After years of disparate major league opportunities with the Dodgers, Miguel Vargas felt flat in the extended run of post-trade playing time the White Sox gave him last year. You probably remember it.
Vargas lost weight over the grind of a six-month season, lost strength as his routine was disrupted, the hard-hit rates and exit velocities evaporated, and he finished the season with a miserable 46 wRC+, which is to say his offensive contributions were 54 percent worse than the average big leaguer. For the 2024 White Sox, he fit right in.
With an offseason to restore his physique and routine, Vargas is clearly bigger and apparently stronger. He altered his hand placement batting stance to remove an excessively noisy hand load; a bad habit developed from needing more effort to swing when he was diminished last season.
"My bat, my path is in the zone for longer now," Vargas said of his tweak. "Last year was a lot of bad habits, and this year, everything is more what I want."
He is pulling the ball more than ever (45 percent). His Statcast hard-hit rate (47.5 percent) is not only a career-high but more than double what he did with the Sox in the second half of last season. While it sure would be nice to see him produce a 110+ mph exit velocity like the height of his Dodgers prospect helium days, Vargas has hit balls in the first 16 games of this season that have come off his bat harder than any batted ball he produced after the trade deadline last season. After his plate discipline was his one redeeming offensive quality in 2024, Vargas is somehow chasing even less (17.5 percent) than before and once more running a double-digit walk rate.
Most surprisingly given the nomadic nature of his prospect days, the White Sox made an early point of announcing Vargas as the primary option at third base in spring training, and that show of confidence has been rewarded with what Statcast has graded out as above-average defense, and what FanGraphs initially regards as the best glovework on the entire roster.
"Obviously he's got the size and stature but he plays at a really good eye level, and he's able to get down there and stay athletic with it," said third base coach Justin Jirschele. "He's not early, he's not late. He's making sure his timing is good with his pre-pitch [movement] to get him off the ball and continue to stay downhill and not get flat-footed. That comes with comfort. When you're playing comfortably, you tend to be smoother, you tend to be more on time. It's just like hitting, when you're comfortable in the box, you're more relaxed and everything's looser and you're just kind of flowing."
Speaking of hitting, Vargas is still sitting at .155/.258/.224; 47 wRC+ for the season through 16 games. Watching both him and the 2025 Sox offense can easily feel the same as last year.
At age 25, with over a season's worth of below average major league results in his career totals (63 wRC+ in 657 PA), and the stain of scathing reviews from across the industry on the trade that brought him here, the numbers that follow him on every television chyron and get projected on the Jumbotron only deepen the well-earned skepticism.
"His decision making is solid, it really is," said Chris Getz. "His swing path is cleaner. He's not getting the results that he would like or we would like as an organization. But he's got to stay the course. Being a young hitter in this league is not easy. What he's going through right now with not getting the hit results, he's certainly not the only one. But I do want to talk about his defense. It's been really good at third base. He continues to get better there and help us save runs on the defensive side. We believe in him. I know he believes in himself and he's going to stay the course and we believe there's production ahead."
With all the underlying indicators in place, Tuesday's game can look like it was almost a breakthrough. Working his umpteenth deep count of the young season, Vargas blasted a double to the wall in right-center in the first with contact that Statcast says would have been a home run in nine park. He nearly legged out an infield single in the third (a groundout was upheld, not confirmed upon review) and his seventh inning fly out to the wall in center was an even faster swing and harder hit ball than his first inning clout. He looked close, a few hours after his manager said he looked close.
"You see it in some of these fastballs where he's fouling them off," said Will Venable. "He's starting to move some of those forward a little bit more. We know that the plate discipline is going to be there, he’s going to make good swing decisions and really more than anything happy about Miguel and his work defensively and what he's been able to do."
If the blizzard of positive underlying indicators at the start of this piece were convincing, this is someone who is hitting the ball hard and on their way to producing.
But if Vargas having below-average raw power while rooted to a position where the best third baseman are power hitters is already a source of anxiety, 58 games of watching him in a Sox uniform has already notably lack pulled hard contact in the air, and it's noticeable that he's lost a tick of sprint speed after bulking up in the winter ... well, then maybe seeing him come up just shy of a monster performance is cold comfort. While we're piling on, Vargas is striking out 27.3 percent of the time despite not having any real contact issues, because his patience means that his at-bats simply drag on into deep counts so regularly.
What Venable's observation hints at is hope that some of his two-strike foul-offs to stay alive in at-bats turn into line drive as Vargas settles into the long runway the White Sox are affording him. And after the up-and-down nature of Vargas' last few years play out, the long runway is a lot of the point with how the White Sox are approaching him.
"He's stronger, but the thing is he has some confidence right now," said hitting coach Marcus Thames. "Coming over last year in the trade and you get off to a really rough start, it's not easy. I see a kid that had success in spring training and that's translating into the season. Stay the course and keep working. He put in a lot of really good work this winter."
Bryan Ramos is back in action at Triple-A this week and offers a return of the sort of internal competition at third base that all healthy organizations should have, but his weird spring training, youth and lack of extended reps in Charlotte all would justify a months-long stay there. While Ramos' 2024 performance seemed more deserving of an extended window in the majors than Vargas', we're mostly adults here and understand that the cost with which Vargas was acquired, his lack of remaining minor league options and the 'now or never' point he's at in his development all make this the season for the White Sox to find out what they have in the 25-year-old.
With the state of the White Sox offense, Vargas producing bad early results, with great underlying indicators is more encouraging than what they have running in multiple other spots. And if fellow bad early results, but great underlying indicators hitter Andrew Vaughn -- and man, his underlying indicators are good -- remains a steady middle-of-the-order presence despite a murkier place in the team's future, it stands to reason that the sun is very far from setting on Vargas.
It is April 16 after all, and abandoning any project at this stage would suggest there was never much confidence in it to begin with, which runs counter to the point of acquiring post-hype prospects and offering them playing time. That we're questioning the Vargas project at this stage is due to 1) needing something to write about and 2) so much has gone wrong with the White Sox in recent years that it's hard to have confidence in any development project that doesn't demand our confidence with immediate results.
In recent days, coaches and players have taken to wearing custom-made shirts that say "South Side Mentality" on the front, and "The Only Way Out is Through" on the back, and rest assured that they printed one in Vargas' size.
