Monday morning's news that Fernando Tatis Jr. needs surgery to repair a fractured wrist certainly upends many fantasy baseball drafts, as he was Tristan H. Cockcroft's No. 7 overall player for points-based leagues and Eric Karabell's No. 3 overall player for rotisserie formats, at the time. Early indications are that Tatis will miss up to three months, which would place his probable return sometime in mid-June.
We asked the hosts of our ESPN Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast to weigh in on where they think the San Diego Padres shortstop should be drafted in the wake of this news.
Tristan H. Cockcroft: There are so many frustrating things about this bit of terrible news, not the least of which is that we've now seen three huge names in our game -- Mike Trout, Ronald Acuna Jr. and now Tatis, dealing with "fantasy landscape altering" injuries over the past year. It's probably completely unfair to put Trout and Tatis in this same sentence, but Tatis' injury history is growing similarly disconcerting, as he has played in only 71% of the Padres' games in his big-league career. Thankfully, he's still only 23 years old, with plenty of time to reverse that trend, but I already had injury questions about him, mostly related to the shoulder issues he played with throughout 2022, and that was the reason for his mere No. 7 overall ranking.
