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2017
The claim: Starred for a Fort Wayne team, the youngest claim in this section and, for its single season, among the largest. Fernando Tatis Jr. was an 18-year-old shortstop from San Pedro de Macoris, in the Dominican Republic, in the San Diego Padres' organisation, when Fort Wayne's TinCaps of the Midwest League gave him his first full professional season in 2017. This section prints his Fort Wayne season and, apart from one closing line, nothing else; his later career stands in other records.
The season: In 117 games Tatis batted .281 with a .390 on-base percentage and a .520 slugging percentage, with 121 hits, 26 doubles, 7 triples, 69 runs batted in, and 29 stolen bases. His 21 home runs set a TinCaps single-season franchise record, and he became the first teenager in the Midwest League to hit 20 home runs and steal 20 bases in a season since Nick Franklin in 2010. He improved every month of the season, batting .370 in August, and the Padres promoted him in late August past the next level entirely, to Double-A San Antonio for its playoff run. Behind him, the young TinCaps he had led reached the Midwest League finals.
Why he is here: Fort Wayne's baseball history runs from the Kekiongas of 1871 through the Daisies to the modern TinCaps, and its function in the professional game now is exactly what Tatis's summer shows: a place where the sport's future passes through at eighteen, visibly, in a downtown ballpark, before the rest of the world knows the name. He reached the majors with San Diego in 2019. The Fort Wayne line in his record, the franchise home run mark and the 20-20 teenage season, still stands in the TinCaps' book as the standard a prospect is measured against at Parkview Field.
Sources:
- MiLB.com, Padres teen Tatis leapfrogs to Texas League, 20 August 2017: the 117 games, the .281/.390/.520 line, the franchise record 21 home runs, the 20-20 teenage mark, the August surge and the San Antonio promotion.
- StatsCrew, 2017 Fort Wayne TinCaps statistics: the full batting line.
- MadFriars announcer series, 247Sports: the 2017 TinCaps' run to the Midwest League finals.
- The Baseball Cube, Fernando Tatis Jr. player record: the San Diego debut of 2019.