Padres Place Two Of Their Biggest Stars On All-MLB First Team

The San Diego Padres had a successful season that featured a significant playoff run, and two of their key players have been rewarded by being place on the All-MLB first team, according to a report from Brent Maguire of MLB.com. 

Outfielder Fernando Tatis Jr. and closer Mason Miller are the two players who made it, and they’re both interesting cases, so let’s do a deeper dive into what they did and how they made it. 

Tatis is especially fascinating because he almost literally had two separate seasons at two different positions. Offensively, his first season was one of the strangest in recent memory, as Tatis had a complete power outage that left him without a home run in his first 55 games. 

After that, though, Tatis exploded. He posted an OPS of .828 to go with 25 home runs, 38 stolen bases and a 5.4 WAR, per Maguire, which was a top-10 mark among position players.

The defensive part of his season was just as interesting, perhaps even more so. The Padres struggled to find offense through the first half of the season. so they took the gamble of moving Tatis to second base to see if that would help him unleash his potential and provide production. 

It took a while for the move to work, but Tatis was surprisingly capable at second and in right field, so the Padres shuttled him back and forth between the two positions to maximize his output, and being back in the infield was likely a big part of how he managed to take off. 

Tatis came up through the minors as a shortstop, so the Padres are now considering a full-time move to second base for their star. There are plenty of moves that need to be made to see if that’s best for the team, but the fact that it’s even in play speaks to his otherworldly atheleticism. 

That’s also true for Miller, but in a completely different way. He had one of the most dominant seasons in history at his position, and Miller had already won the Reliever of the Year award when this teams was revealed. He featured devastating velocity, with both his fastball and slider often over 100 mph.

He wound up with  1.67 ERA with 129 strikeouts in 70 innings, per Maguire, and Miller struck out 47.4 percent of opposing hitters, which is the sixth-best mark of any season with a minimum of 50 innings pitched.