At Fox Sports, Kevin Hench organized a list of the top nine players who had to unexpectedly fill in this season.

Ranking number five on the list is Fernando Tatis, filling in for the injured Moises Alou and Ryan Church this season.  About Tatis, he writes:

Moises Alou has hit .342 in his first 102 games for the Mets. The problem is the Mets have played 276 games over that stretch. The fact that Alou blew out his hamstring while rehabbing a calf injury pretty much sums up his tenure in New York. Enter Tatis. The once-promising third baseman most famous for hitting two grand slams in one inning as a member of the Cardinals had played 28 games in the bigs over the last four seasons. But reinvented as an everyday outfielder Tatis has enjoyed an improbable resurrection this season in Queens, hitting .310 with an .873 OPS.

Tatis is batting .310 with 9 HRs and 33 RBIs in 184 ABs this year.

If this were Deal Or No Deal baseball edition and we were told Fernando Tatis would bat .280 with 5 HRs and 25 RBIs in the same span, I know I would have taken the deal right away because I wasn’t confident in Tatis’s ability to play baseball at the major league level.  Fortunately for us, Deal Or No Deal baseball edition does not exist and Tatis’s stats have been much better than that.

Frankly, we’ve taken Tatis and his surprising production for granted.

The look on my face when we first called up Fernando Tatis was similar to the look of the average person when he realizes that he stepped in dog crap on the street - frustrated, annoyed and helpless all at once.  Yet, I had that same look for Jose Valentin in 2006.  Both times I feared that we were calling up an aging re-tread that was no longer good enough to be playing baseball on the major league level.  However, both times Tatis and Valentein turned in more than adequate performances, which could have easily been well below average.