Tatis is a case of suspended animation

With six playoff spaces allotted in the National League, are the Padres 7th best?

Clebetasol is meant to ease the itch of ringworm. Clostebol is meant to build up muscle for athletes, like the old East German track assembly line. Fernando Tatis Jr. claims he got the two mixed up. He suffers an 80-game suspension because of it, andthe Padres’ 53-year itch for a world championship lives on.

It could have been worse. Tatis could have confused CBD with DDT.

Regardless, his comeback from a motorcycle accident is postponed until 2023. Manny Machado and Juan Soto will have to push on without the triangulation that Tatis was supposed to give them. As manager Bob Melvin said, “I’m glad we made the deals that we did.”

If Tatis was looking for a sympathetic shoulder, the Padres basically told him to find one on the 5 Freeway.

"You have to learn from these situations,” said general manager A.J. Preller. “He’s somebdy from an organization’s standpoint we’ve invested time and money into.”

Preller was referring to a 14-year, $340 million deal that is now in Year 2. Tatis is 23 and has a .965 OPS and 81 home runs. But in four seasons he has played only 273 games.

“We were hoping…there would be some maturity and obviously with the news today,” Preller said. “It’s more of a pattern and it’s something we’ve got to dig a bit more into.

“At the end of the day it’s one thing to say it. You’ve got to start showing it by your actions. What we need to get to is a point in time where we trust him. That’s been something we haven’t really been able ot have there. These things only work when there’s trust both ways.”

Said Machado: “There’s a drug policy in place. He failed a drug screen. For whatever reason. Ultimately he’s suspended and can’t play. That’s a player’s responsibility, to make sure he’s within compliance of that.”

No one in the organization has forgotten that Tatis’ wrist-breaking motorcycle accident was depicted as a minor scrape in December. The Padres didn’t know the full damage until March, and Tatis later hinted there was one more crackup.

Tatis wouldn’t be the first guy to see the light in time to fashion a Hall of Fame career, but the truth is that he became a star before he became an everyday ballplayer.

The matter at hand is the rush for the National League playoffs. To review, the top two division winners get a first-round bye, which the third division winner and the three wild-cards conduct 3-game series. That’s six playoff spots. The National League has seven playoff-worthy teams.

There are those will project the Dodgers and Mets in the NLCS, since they’re by far the front-runners for the bye. The Dodgers are going through a stretch where the opposing parents are calling for their birth certificates. And, just as Tatis disappears, they expect to get three significant pitchers back: Walker Buehler, Dustin May and Blake Treinen.

But the Mets will be favored in every start made by Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom, and at the moment there is no more emphatic closer than Edwin Diaz. Pete Alonso, the Polar Bear, has driven the BLT run, the one that Breaks The Last Tie, in five of the Mets’ previous seven wins.

The Braves keep adding ready-to-roll rookies like Michael Harris II and Spencer Strider. The Phillies profited immediately from Rob Thomson’s promotion to manager. St. Louis needs only to stabilize its rotation to develop deep-October dreams. Milwaukee’s management antagonized parts of the clubhouse when it shipped Josh Hader to San Diego, but the pitching combo of Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff is a short-series nightmare.

Unfortunately, too few teams are trying to win, which makes for too few interesting series. The Dodgers are the Globetrotters of the N.L. West, and everybody else is coached by Red Klotz. So how can you foretell the fall?

Well, you might look at the record in 1-run games:

San Diego 20-11

Milwaukee 21—15

Atlanta 16—10

New York 15—12

St. Louis 16—13

Philadelphia 15—16

Los Angeles 8—9

You’ll notice the Dodgers rarely take it to the limit. They are 35-5 in blowout games, defined as ones with margins of five or more runs. But they’re a lot like all those Atlanta 162-game wonder boys of the 90s and 00s. If you can somehow match their starting pitching and maneuver the game into the bullpen, strange things can happen.

The only problem with this theory, as with most analytics, is that it acts as the coroner instead of the doctor. It tells you what happened without a clue about the future. For instance, the Braves were 26-31 in one-run games last season and still won the world championship, as did Washington in 2019 despite a 17-21 cliffhanger record.

OK, so what happens when the best meet the best? Here are the standings of the musical-chairs contestants against teams that are .500 or better.

Los Angeles 26—14

New York 31-23

Milwaukee 26—23

Philadelphia 28—29

St Louis 23—27

Atlanta 21—26

San Diego 20—27.

The key number might be 57, which is the number of games Philadelphia has played against the winners. If you win the World Series you say it made your team tougher. If you don’t, you don’t.

In any event, the N.L. will be the kind of knock-down drag-out that you once witnessed during conventional pennant races, prior to the 1969 expansion, when there was only one ticket to the World Series, and the Giants and Dodgers spent most Septembers chewing it into pieces. There still has never been a stretch run like the N.L. in 1964, when the Phillies fell out of the sky, the Reds took command and then collapsed, and the Cardinals somehow waltzed through the rubble and won on the final day.

This won’t be like that, but the Divisional Playoff and League Championship Series should be good from the first pitch, a welcome opportunity to turn the phone off for three-plus hours and gather the snacks. Just don’t send Fernando Tatis Jr. to get them.