Fernando Tatis Jr. grew up in baseball. In big-leagues clubhouses. In dugouts. On the diamond.
The 27-year-old Tatis has friends throughout the game, especially with those he shared the field with for the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic this past spring. That team included one of his oldest friends in the game — Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who’ll be in town with the Toronto Blue Jays this weekend.
Their fathers were teammates in Montreal. They were both born in 1999. Their MLB debuts both arrived in 2019, less than a month apart.
“We’ve known each other since we were kids,” Tatis said. “We know our families. It’s not that we were best friends growing up, but we always knew each other. We grew closer when we were teenagers and our careers have kind of blended together a little bit.
“It’s been very nice.”
Tatis and Guerrero don’t talk every day and they definitely don’t talk baseball, although they certainly might have had notes to compare during notable power outages to start this season.
Mostly, they talk about life: How are you doing? How’s the family? That kind of thing.
Jackson Merrill met James Wood as a teenager on the travel-ball circuit in the Baltimore/ Washington D.C. area. They reconnected while playing showcases as high school seniors and became teammates in 2021, when the Padres drafted Merrill 27th overall and Wood 62nd overall. The two were climbing the ladder to San Diego together the following summer when Wood was pulled off low Single-A Lake Elsinore’s roster and traded as part of the haul needed to reel in Juan Soto.
Merrill said he looks forward to seeing his friend twice a year, when the Nationals and Padres meet up.
“It’s cool to see him from time to time,” Merrill said. “Obviously, I wish we were still on the same team. He’d be a huge problem on our team.
“I just miss him. He’s an awesome dude.”
Some of Mason Miller’s closest friends — like Yankees closer David Bednar — hail from his hometown of Pittsburgh. But a good deal of Padres met their life-mates somewhere along their journey in professional baseball.
Sung-Mun Song’s best friend is someone who’s been on a similar journey from the KBO to the United States.
Hyeseong Kim is currently at the Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate in Oklahoma City. He and Song trace their friendship back to 2017, when they were road-trip roommates during Kim’s first season with Nexen.
“We’re close,” Song said through interpreter Juneseo Yi. “I talk to him every two to three days.”
For years, Xander Bogaerts shared the left side of the Red Sox infield with Rafael Devers. With the two winning a World Series in 2018, there are lots of good memories to revisit every time the Padres play the Giants now.
“We played so long next to each other,” Bogaerts said. “We took a lot of groundballs, kind of like me and Manny (Machado) now.”
Both JP Sears and Ty France are close friends with former teammates.
France and Mariners shortstop J.P. Crawford gravitated to each other in Seattle as Southern Californians, while Sears met his closest friend — Red Sox reliever Greg Weissert — while climbing levels in the Yankees system.
For a time, Weissert even moved to Sears’ hometown of Charleston, S.C.
So over the last three offseasons, there has been a lot of golf, family beach days and training sessions. They even bought a Trackman.
“Kind of investing in our careers together,” Sears said.
Likewise, Nick Pivetta considers his closest friend outside the Padres — Rangers starting pitcher Nathan Eovaldi — to be someone who was key to unlocking new levels in his development as a big-leaguer.
“When I got traded to Boston, it was a really big, pivotal moment in my career for me,” Pivetta said. “I really had to find out who I was and stick, and I was really grateful to be around that ‘21 team with a lot of great leaders, but Eovaldi was really able to help me out and progress myself.”
Gavin Sheets became good friends with Andrew Benintendi when the former Red Sox prospect caught on with the White Sox. Randy Vásquez befriended Anthony Volpe, Jasson Dominguez and Austin Wells when they came up together in the Yankees system.
The same goes for Padres infielder Jake Cronenworth and Rockies catcher Brett Sullivan. They were both drafted by the Rays — 10 rounds apart — in 2015 and played every level together until Cronenworth was traded to San Diego in 2019. Sullivan ultimately made his way to San Diego, too, before moving on to the Rockies. Cronenworth said he and Sullivan talk “every day to every other day.”
The communication between Padres pitcher Kyle Hart and Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber isn’t quite so consistent.
“It’s a couple days a week or whenever he wants to respond,” Hart said with a laugh. “He gets pretty busy during the All-Star break.”
And Schwarber has been to quite a few All-Star Games since the two played travel ball together in the Cincinnati area. Schwarber even helped recruit Hart to Indiana University, where the two were batterymates.
They’ve yet to face each other in the majors. Hart was in Triple-A El Paso when the Padres played the Phillies six times in a span of 11 games earlier this year.
“I was (freaking) pissed,” Hart said with a laugh.
Asked how he thinks he’d do against the notorious Padres bully, Hart said: “Everybody thinks you can take anybody until something bad happens. I think we would have some good at-bats.”