PHOENIX — The dreadlocks and the smile.
They were back.
The energy will come. It was not the electric return he has had before, but Fernando Tatis Jr. is 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.
Tatis played Thursday night for the first time since the end of the 2021 season.
“Kind of like my debut in the big leagues, kind of those nerves again,” he 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 was hitless in his five at-bats as the Padres’ lead-off hitter, but the Padres beat the Diamondbacks 7-5 at Chase Field, where well more than half the announced crowd of 16,734 wore some combination of brown and/or gold and cheered lustily at every mention of Tatis’ name.
The two guys who kept the lead-off spot warm for Tatis made sure the Padres won in his first game back.
Trent Grisham had a pair of two-run doubles — the first to put the Padres up 2-0 in the second inning and the other to break a 5-5 tie in the sixth inning.
Xander Bogaerts hit a two-run homer in the third to give the Padres a 4-1 lead.
It was just the third time in 11 games the Padres scored more than three runs, and they led 5-1 after Matt Carpenter’s home run in the fourth.
Five hits and two wild pitches into the bottom of the fourth, the game was tied. Michael Wacha made it through that inning but was replaced by Brent Honeywell before the bottom of the fifth began.
A one-hit fifth for Honeywell gave way to an adventure in the sixth — one that Honeywell helped create and that he escaped. Josh Rojas led off with a single, went to second when Honerywell’s pickoff throw bounced past first baseman Jake Cronenworth and to third on Lourdes Gurriel’s fly ball to deep left field. Honeywell walked off the mound after a pop out by Corbin Carroll and strikeout of cleanup hitter Christian Walker.
Tim Hill worked a perfect seventh, Steven Wilson a perfect eighth and Josh Hader earned his sixth save with a perfect ninth.
Tatis swung so hard at the first pitch thrown to him that he had to catch his balance as he hopped across the plate. Four pitches later, he swung over a slider for the first of three strikeouts Ryne Nelson would record in the first inning.
Tatis led off the third inning with a groundout to shortstop. He led off the fifth inning with a soft lineout to right field. He struck out on four pitches in the seventh inning and lined out to left field in the ninth.
The anticlimactic night was the first time Tatis had returned from an extended absence and not had at least one hit. In four career games after coming off the injured list, he was 10-for-17 with four home runs and three doubles.
This was a longer absence than those — 564 days between games, to be exact.
Tatis sat on the top of the bench in the visitors’ dugout at Chase Field on Thursday afternoon 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.
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 appeared to be 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.”
That last part is why the anticipation for this day has been immense, 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 have just one name.
He 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.”
