Miguel Vargas was kidnapped and replaced by a Replicant. Hopefully the Old Version Will Never Come Back.
One of my favorite sticks to beat the White Sox with (and over the past few years, there have been a lot) has been the 2024 Erick Fedde trade.
You know one: Chicago was on its way to a record number of losses, and with a season in the tank, GM Chris Getz traded away three of his best players – Michael Kopech, Tommy Pham, and Fedde – in a three-way deal with the Cardinals and Dodgers. The 2024 White Sox endured a losing season that redefined the term; trading those guys was clearly the right thing for Getz to do. My objection was to return.
Headlining the White Sox was Miguel Vargas, then a second baseman for the Dodgers named Miguel, after 35 years of age the Marlins didn’t need him. Not only did the Dodgers get Kopech, they were able to get Tommy Edman, the best player in the deal, as well. Kopech stepped in quickly as a power reliever, Edman won the NLCS MVP, and the Dodgers won the World Series.
Vargas didn’t leave a big hole with the Dodgers; he played in 128 games there over three seasons and hit .201/.294/.364. At the time of the trade, he mostly played left field, and was two-tenths of a win below the replacement rate for his career. His first taste of life in Chicago was even worse. In 42 games through 2024, Vargas hit .104/.217/.170, good for a -1.2 WAR. This is an alarming number in a short period of time.
He was better in 2025 – before opening a vial of nerve gas during a mound visit, he couldn’t have been worse – but .234 / .316 / .401 with an infield corner below average defense got Vargas to 1.4 WAR in 138 games. Good enough to start on a bad team (that’s what he did), but not indicative of future star power.
Here’s something that shows star power: In his first 46 games of 2026, Vargas is hitting .241/.366/.494. A player who has been below replacement level up to this point in his career has produced a 1.7 WAR in less than two months. Over the past 30 days, he is second in WAR among all position players in the major leagues. During that time, he is hitting .309 with nine home runs in 26 games and as many walks as strikeouts.
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I’ll put my cards on the table: At the end of last season, I thought this guy stinks. And when a bad player makes a hot play in May, Occam’s Razor produces one explanation above all others: Paleness. It’s the luck of the ball, or weak competition, or something that’s going to reverse, maybe quickly.
Vargas has had good batted ball luck, but on the other side. His .234 BABIP is among the 20 lowest in the league, and nearly 30 points lower than last year. He actually underperformed his xwOBA by 24 points. The red flags I would expect to steer him back at the replacement level are not there.
That’s because Vargas has changed something about his game: He’s swinging the club harder. It’s very difficult. If you have an advanced degree in physics or engineering, you may have already figured this out, but swinging the bat faster makes the baseball go faster, and faster:
Miguel Vargas Swings Hard
| The season | CompSw | BatSpd | FastSw% | SwgLng | HardHit% | EV90 | xSLG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 400 | 69.8 | 8.3% | 7.7 | 26.3% | 101.2 | .301 |
| 2025 | 940 | 70.6 | 11.7% | 7.6 | 40.5% | 103.2 | .407 |
| 2026 | 308 | 73.7 | 40.3% | 7.6 | 44.4% | 105.5 | .546 |
With some of these new Statcast metrics, it takes a while to establish a good foundation. How much does a .350 OBP equate to, with bat speed? So I’ll tell you this: Adding 3.1 mph of bat speed in one season is a big deal. It’s the biggest year-over-year change this season, and the biggest year-over-year change since we got this data in 2023.
Only player to increase bat speed in one season? Brice Turang, between 2024 and 2025. You will remember how that story went.
Last year, Vargas’ batting average was in the 25th percentile. It is now at 70 percent. And here’s the interesting part: There was actually one thing Vargas was really good at early in his career, and far from bat speed compromising that skill, it’s compounded the gains he’s made.
Since 2024, Vargas has always had good plate discipline and a good swing. Of the 341 hitters with at least 500 plate appearances since the start of 2024, Vargas has the 28th lowest strikeout rate. His in-zone contact rate, 85.8%, is a little above average, but that’s okay. He is within a tenth of a percent of Juan Soto, Corey Seager, Pete Alonso, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Vargas’ average attack angle has been 11 or 12 degrees over the past three seasons. That puts him right in the middle of what Baseball Savant considers the ideal angle of attack (between five and 20 degrees). That’s a bat technique that leads to hard line drives and fly balls. As of the start of 2024, Vargas has a perfect strikeout rate of 63.8%, which is the eighth best in baseball. During that same span, Vargas has a GB/FB ratio of just 0.60, which is the fifth lowest among hitters with at least 500 plate appearances.
Vargas also has a slight pull bias in his swing, which is good for a guy who puts the ball in the air that much – 350-foot fly balls to pull home runs, while balls hit the same distance to dead center or out alleys. His strikeout rate over the past three seasons has been within the tenth percentile of 23.0% each year. (The major league average is 16.8%.)
That sounds good, but Vargas’ power so far has left him annoyingly limited. Last year, he produced 94 popups and fly balls with exit velocities between 80 and 95 mph — seventh-highest in the league. He hit .054 (with an xBA of .032) in those balls. So the ball was moving in the right direction, just not going there fast enough to do damage:
Miguel Vargas Is Still Twisting In The Right Thing
| The season | GB/FB | Contact% (sc) | Swing% (mlb) | Swing% (mlb) | Z-Contact% (mlb) | BB% | K% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 63.6% | 81.3% | 21.8% | 67.3% | 82.6% | 10.5% | 24.1% |
| 2025 | 56.9% | 82.4% | 21.6% | 69.1% | 86.6% | 9.8% | 17.6% |
| 2026 | 68.2% | 85.9% | 17.2% | 70.1% | 87.2% | 14.9% | 16.3% |
And as you can see, everything he was doing well before – strong plate discipline, launch angle, high contact level – is either unaffected or slightly improved.
Vargas hasn’t changed much. He’s standing a few degrees wider, and while he’s catching his leg kick, it looks like he’s coming down more on the back leg, which probably helps him explode forward as he swings:
Indeed, he took a strong approach that was held back by lack of energy, and put it in a place where it works. (There is a strong historical legend about the development of the P-51 Mustang, particularly the decision to install a supercharged Rolls-Royce engine in the aircraft, but I’ll let the pilots agree without wasting everyone’s time.)
There are still gaps in Vargas’ game. He doesn’t add much to the bases, and while it looks like he’ll stick to third base for now, he’s not a great defender there. That said, I wasn’t happy with how “the best season of a 21st Century White Sox player” is achieved.
The Sox haven’t had a 5-WAR season by a starting pitcher since Yoán Moncada in 2019. They have only two seasons of position players of 4.0 WAR or better (Tim Anderson in 2021 and Luis Robert Jr. in 2023) this decade. The franchise high for single-season WAR since 2000 is just 6.2, set by Adam Eaton in 2016.
Vargas and Munetaka Murakami both sport wRC+ stats of 140 or better; barring the COVID-shortened 2020 season, the last White Sox hitter to do so was José Abreu in his rookie season. If Vargas keeps going like this, he won’t single-handedly turn the franchise around or anything, but I’m definitely going to stop mocking the White Sox for trading Fedde.
All stats for Monday, May 18 games.
