PHOENIX — The dreadlocks and the smile and the energy.
They are back.
After the motorcycle accident and the wrist surgery. After the tease of a buildup last summer and the 80-game suspension for a failed PED test handed down in August. After a shoulder surgery and a second wrist surgery and a winter of waiting. After some more waiting through the first 20 games of the season while the suspension was completed.
Fernando Tatis Jr. was playing again Thursday night.
"Kind of like my debut in the big leagues, kind of those nerves again," Tatis said Thursday afternoon. "Just happy to be here. Grateful for the chance. We've got a long way to go and can't wait to contribute and be with my teammates and be in that jungle."
Tatis sat on the top of the bench in the visitors' dugout at Chase Field before Thursday's game against the Diamondbacks and faced a couple dozen cameras and mobile phones held up to record his visage and his voice.
It was similar to a scene in the home dugout at Petco Park seven months earlier.
"Way better, way better," Tatis said. "Especially just feeling that I'm gonna play baseball tonight is just at the top of the world right now."
This time, he was not answering questions about the beginning of a suspension and what he planned to change. He was talking about the beginning of his season and how he has changed.
"Just more mature," Tatis said. "Learned different stuff. Came from a really bad situation, and I feel like I overcame it with the right stuff."
Tatis has earned rave reviews from the Padres for what he has done and the way he has gone about it.
He agreed to surgery in September to repair the labrum in his left shoulder, a procedure he declined to have a year earlier. He was in virtually daily contact with the team while home in the Dominican Republic during the offseason, and he returned in early January to San Diego to train at Petco Park and with pitcher Joe Musgrove.
"It's tough when you've been in the spotlight and something negative happens," Padres Chairman Peter Seidler said this week. "Words don't mean anything. Actions have to speak for you. His actions have spoken with conviction. I've seen the under-the-radar quiet work he has done to get himself prepared for the next step."
Tatis' embrace of a move to right field is indicative of his growth.
Where he seemed disengaged much of the time when playing there in 2021, as the Padres attempted to protect his shoulder, he was alert and was clearly having fun at the spot all through the spring while making steady improvement in recognition and routes to fly balls.
"Definitely looking forward to embrace it, and got myself prepared for it," Tatis said. "And I feel like I'm gonna do a very fun and good job out there."
Besides the .965 career OPS he took into Thursday's game, the "fun" part is what fueled the anticipation for this day, inside the Padres clubhouse and around San Diego and among the thousands of Padres fans inside Chase Field on Thursday.
It can be argued how many better players there are in the major leagues than Tatis. The list of players that are as exciting in as many ways — hitting, running, sliding, throwing, diving, dancing — is much shorter and might not have another name.
Tatis is the one who made swinging at 3-0 pitches up by seven runs OK. He helped put to rest any argument about bat flips by making them an art form.
It is a common refrain from people who watch Tatis play that he was born to play the game. And it has been impossible to not believe he loves the game as much as any player.
He might love it more now.
"Just being apart for a period of time," Tatis said Thursday. "Just taking time to realize and just know how really blessed I am to play to be able to play this game at the level I've been playing, the way I play it. All the kids are watching. And the vibe they give me, that love they give me genuinely back, I feel like it feeds me every single time. I feel like I just want to keep doing it and see that generation of boys playing that way."
