MLB trends: Fernando Tatis Jr.'s power outage, Roki Sasaki's new pitch and the return of the National League

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In about a week’s time, we’ll reach the one-third point of the season, which is when things start to become real. Teams typically use the first third of the season to evaluate their roster, the middle third to make any necessary changes, and the final third to ride those changes out. We’re getting closer to the “make any necessary changes” part of the 2026 season.

With that in mind, here are three trends to keep an eye on as we head into the dog days of summer.

Fernando Tatis Jr.’s power outage

Fernando Tatis Jr.

SD • RF • #23

BA0.233

R16

HR0

RBI15

SB11

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Entering play Tuesday, no player in baseball had taken more plate appearances without hitting a home run than Padres right-fielder-turned-part-time-second-baseman Fernando Tatis Jr. Tatis had batted 197 times without going deep. Rays speedster Chandler Simpson was second with 191 homerless plate appearances. Only 11 others had 100 plate appearances without a homer.

“It’s wild, honestly. I go home and I think about it,” Padres hitting coach Steven Souza Jr. told the San Diego Union-Tribune of Tatis’ power outage back in mid-April. “I mean, it’s only a matter of time. They come in bunches and he hits the ball so hard. It’s missiles. Watching him this year, it’s like he should be hitting .380.”

The lack of home runs is not the result of a lack of hard contact. Tatis ranks among the top 25 qualified hitters in average exit velocity (92.1 mph, tied with Max Muncy), 90th percentile exit velocity (108.9 mph, tied with Munetaka Murakami), and hard-hit rate (56.6%, just ahead of Ben Rice). Tatis hasn’t turned into a slap hitter. The hard contact has been there.

The problem is not contact quality, but rather batted ball direction. Tatis has gradually become more of an opposite-field hitter over the years, and he’s gone over the cliff this season. Only a handful of hitters have pulled the ball less in the air this year, and those who have are guys like Simpson, Nasim Nuñez, and Victor Scott II (i.e. speed guys, not power hitters).

	Pulled air rate	Overall pulled rate
2021	22.2%	42.4%
2023	15.1%	39.5%
2024	14.5%	38.9%
2025	12.0%	36.2%
2026	6.3%	25.4%
MLB average	16.8%	36.4%

We all love those “nice piece of hitting” opposite-field singles, but pulling the ball gets you to heaven. Pulled fly balls and line drives have produced a .583 batting average and 1.289 slugging percentage this year. Balls hit to the opposite field are at .295 and .436, respectively. Tatis is hitting the ball hard, just to the wrong side of the field. You can only be so productive going the other way.

The question is why Tatis has been unable to pull the ball this season. He has closed his batted stance significantly this year, from 38 degrees open last year (11th most open in baseball) to a more average 10 degrees open this year. This is what that looks like:

Tatis has significantly closed his stance in 2026.
MLB.com/CBS Sports

Tatis has really closed his stance this year and, as a result, his front foot lands closer to the plate, so he’s more closed off when the bat meets the ball. It’s hard to pull the ball when you’re hitting from that position. Is the fix as simple as Tatis going back to the more open stance he used previously? It might be. He’s closing in on 200 homerless plate appearances. It’s worth trying, at least.

You’ll notice 2022 missing from that table above. Tatis missed that season with a performance-enhancing drug suspension and also left shoulder surgery, which is his front shoulder when hitting (the power shoulder). He hasn’t regained his previous 40-homer power since the surgery/suspension, but Tatis averaged 29 homers per 162 games from 2023-25. He still had plenty of over-the-fence power. It has vanished this year though. The extreme opposite-field approach is the biggest culprit.

Roki Sasaki’s new/old splitter

Roki Sasaki

LAD • P • #11

ERA5.09

WHIP1.45

IP40.2

BB16

K39

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This past Sunday, Dodgers righty Roki Sasaki turned in his most impressive start as a big leaguer, holding an admittedly weak Angels lineup to one run on three singles and a double in seven innings. He struck out eight and walked zero. It was Sasaki’s first time completing seven innings in MLB. Only twice in his previous 15 starts did he complete even six innings.

“In terms of the fastball, I want more velo. The offspeed pitches, I feel pretty good about it,” Sasaki mentioned through an interpreter after the game (via MLB.com). “I’ll just keep continuing working on it and make sure I’ll be in a better spot.”

Sasaki has a 3.50 ERA with 17 strikeouts and only two walks in 18 innings across three starts in May. This recent run of success coincides with the introduction of a new pitch that is really an old pitch. Sasaki has brought back the splitter he threw in Japan, adding it to the forkball he’s thrown since last season. (He also works with a four-seam fastball and a slider.)

Forkball and splitter can seem interchangeable, but they’re really not. Splitters have more velocity (there’s a reason “splitter” is short for “split-finger fastball”) and forkballs have more tumble. In limited usage, Sasaki’s splitter has averaged 90.1 mph with about eight inches less drop and nine inches more horizontal movement than the forkball, which has averaged 85.1 mph.

In English, that means the splitter breaks away from left-handed batters while the forkball breaks down, plus it comes in about 5 mph harder. Two different velocity ranges, two different movement profiles, two different pitches. The results have been great too. Hitters have missed with over 40% of their swings against the new splitter. A whiff rate over 40% on any pitch type is terrific.

“When he threw that splitter, and it matched plane with the fastball, it’s hard to tell the two apart,” Angels first baseman Nolan Schanuel mentioned after facing Sasaki on Sunday (via MLB.com). “Just came and threw his best today.”

Why did Sasaki wait until now, the second month of his second season, to break out what was his signature pitch in Japan? It’s hard to say. The ball itself is different here than in Japan, so perhaps it took time to master. Sasaki missed four months with a shoulder issue last year and it could be that getting healthy took priority over optimizing pitch shapes.

The new/old splitter and the forkball are two different pitches that serve different purposes. They force hitters to cover two different velocity ranges and movement profiles. Sasaki’s fastball, despite its upper-90s velocity, still isn’t a great pitch. Hitters see it well and don’t miss often when they swing. The splitter gives Sasaki another weapon he needed to expand his arsenal.

Another sign of the National League’s dominance

Let’s call a spade a spade: The AL stinks this year. Entering play Tuesday, only four AL teams had a winning record and only five had a positive run differential. Eight NL teams had a winning record and seven had a positive run differential. The last-place team in the NL Central would be in first place in the AL West. It’s bleak out there in the AL.

For a long time, the AL dominated interleague play, which made sense because they had the DH and a roster with one more actual hitter available. AL and NL baseball used to be very different, stylistically. Then the universal DH arrived for good in 2022 and leveled the interleague playing field. This year, the NL has dominated interleague games:

	NL interleague winning percentage
1997-2021 (no universal DH)	.476 (77-win pace)
2022-25 (universal DH)	.513 (83-win pace)
2026	.580 (94-win pace)

(2020 has been removed from the 1997-2021 data set, given the weirdness of that season.)

The AL dominated interleague play for more than two decades. The NL started to catch up as soon as the universal DH arrived (the NL had a .443 interleague winning percentage in 2021, the last year without the universal DH) and this year the NL is having its way with its AL counterparts. That .580 winning percentage would be the third best ever (AL was .611 in 2006 and .591 in 2008).

Everything in this game is cyclical and now it’s the NL’s turn to be the better league. Give it a few years and the AL will be back on top. That’s part of this, for sure. Know what else has contributed to this? The AL is bleeding talent. Think of all the great players who went from the AL to the NL for one reason or another in recent years: Mookie Betts, Francisco Lindor, Manny Machado, Shohei Ohtani, Matt Olson, Chris Sale, etc. It’s an impressive list.

Excluding Juan Soto’s one year with the Yankees, the best players to permanently relocate from the NL to the AL in the last 10 years are Gerrit Cole and Corey Seager (at least by WAR). The next best might be Jacob deGrom, who’s missed a lot of time with injuries, and Cody Bellinger, who’s been an AL player for one year and two months. The NL keeps poaching the AL’s best players.

You can chalk the NL to AL talent drain up to the Dodgers becoming dynastic as the Astros slide out of contention, Steve Cohen’s Mets becoming a top spender as Hal Steinbrenner’s Yankees stopped pacing the league in payroll, the Padres acting like a big-market team while the formerly big-spending Tigers scaled back, so on and so forth. There are a lot of reasons for the NL’s superiority, which seems to be becoming more extreme with each passing year.