Daulton Varsho Is Daulton Varshoing Harder Than Ever

By all rights, this should be a lost season for Daulton Varsho. The Toronto center fielder missed the first month of 2025 while rehabbing from offseason rotator cuff surgery. He started his year with a seven-game minor league rehab stint during which he batted .129 with no walks and no extra-base hits, good for a wRC+ of -29. Varsho got one month in Toronto, and then a strained hamstring stole another two months from him. After seven more games in the minors, Varsho returned on August 1 and now has 20 more games under his belt. So just to recap, Varsho’s season has gone: rehab for a month, play for a month, injured for two months, play for another month. He’s seen a grand total of 44 games of action.

That’s not exactly enough time to get your bearings, especially after a major surgery. At least, that wouldn’t be enough time for most people. Varsho is putting up the best numbers of his career. He’d never topped a wRC+ of 106 in a single season, but he’s currently at 127. He’s already posted 1.5 WAR, and although he can only get into a maximum of 74 games, he’s almost certain to put up the third-most WAR of his career. What makes all this even wilder is that Varsho only heated up during this most recent stint. He ran a 102 wRC+ before the hamstring injury, and he’s at 161 since he returned. As the cliché goes, getting Varsho back from the IL was Toronto’s best trade deadline acquisition. In fact, on a per-PA basis, Varsho has been a top-25 position player, on pace for 4.3 WAR over a normal, 150-game season.

So what is Varsho doing differently in this weird, bifurcated season? I’ll go over a few changes later on, but honestly, not that much. He’s just being himself, but his traits have been intensified over this short timeframe. Varsho has always been an extreme lift-and-pull hitter with a very steep swing. He piles up home runs and strikeouts, and he runs low BABIPs despite his speed because of that homer-or-bust approach. This season, he’s striking out more than ever, hitting more homers than ever, and running a career-low BABIP. Varsho has always been one of the game’s true elite outfielders despite below-average arm strength. This season, he’s putting up bonkers defensive numbers even though his arm has been one of the weakest in baseball so far. It’s like we got the from-concentrate version of Daulton Varsho, but somebody forgot to add water.

We won’t spend too much time on Varsho’s defense. I assume you already know that he was arguably one of the best defenders in the game before he got hurt (and if you didn’t, this article Ben Clemens wrote three weeks ago will catch you up in a hurry). He’s still the same guy. He already ranks 17th among all outfielders in DRS and 15th in OAA. We shouldn’t read too much into defensive metrics over such a small sample, but it’s obvious that Varsho is still one of the game’s very best fielders. As for his arm, his hardest throw this season is 77 mph. Last season, his average was 83.7 mph, which put him in just the 40th percentile. Obviously, we need to account for the likelihood that following the surgery, Varsho either doesn’t have all his strength back or doesn’t want to test the shoulder just yet. That could be tamping down the numbers temporarily, but it’s definitely something to watch next year.

The big reason Varsho has been having such a great season at the plate is that so far, 27.3% of his fly balls have left the park. He came into 2025 with a career mark of 12.6%. That number will have to come down sooner or later. That’s not to say that Varsho hasn’t earned his 15 homers, though. He absolutely has. Baseball Savant gives him an expected home run total of 14.4, and it doesn’t mark any of his home runs as “doubters.” He’s really crushing the ball, and in a moment, I will argue that he may have reached a slightly higher echelon in terms of raw power. But we probably shouldn’t change our opinion of who Varsho is as a hitter. Over his six seasons and 620 games, this is the fifth time he’s put up a 134 wRC+ or better over a 44-game stretch and the fourth time he’s topped 180 over a 20-game stretch. Not only has he been here before, he’s done this somewhat regularly. My first draft of this article included a bunch more fun numbers, but Varsho went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and lost a run according to DRS and OAA, which blew them all up. That’s what happens over a stretch this short.

Players who specialize in the Three True Outcomes tend to be streaky. They crush homers when they’re in a good place and strike out when they’re not. Varsho won’t stay in this kind of groove forever, especially when he’s striking out nearly 30% of the time. No one could. He’s running an absurd .350 isolated slugging percentage. His career high before this was .207. Earlier this season, I wrote about how an absurdly high percentage of Cal Raleigh’s hits were home runs. Varsho has officially tied him at 41.67%:

Varsho has his own opinion about why he can’t stop hitting homers. “I think the ‘why’ is because I’m trying to get above fastballs,” Varsho told reporters a few weeks ago. “Then obviously, when the off-speed comes, I’m just clipping them underneath. I’m not trying to do anything different. I’m not trying to hit homers. I’m trying to hit a groundball right back to the pitcher, to be honest. It’s about being able to be short and quick to the ball and the power will come. I’ve said it from the get go. If I can just control that, good things are going to happen.”

In part, that’s a classic approach: trying to drive the fastball to the big part of the field, which allows you to pull softer stuff. Swinging above the ball is also a common cue in this age of super-flat four-seamers. However, this is the first time I’ve heard anyone say that swinging above the fastball also allows them to do a better job of going down and getting under offspeed stuff. With his steep swing, Varsho has always been better against low pitches, and that has stayed true this season.

So we’re probably not seeing a brand new version of Varsho. His approach may be driving this explosion, or he could just be seeing the ball well. He did run a much higher swing rate on pitches in the zone back in May, but it’s come back down in August. He mostly looks like Daulton Varsho. That on its own is pretty impressive, considering the way injuries have disrupted his season.

Having said all that, here’s why I don’t think it’s too early to say that Varsho might have leveled up his power. First, Varsho is swinging the bat harder than he did last season or during the second half of 2023. Even if you control for all the factors involved in bat speed by looking only at pitches over the heart of the plate, or only at hard-hit balls, or whiffs, or certain pitch types, his bat is faster. He’s also reached a new max exit velocity. On May 13, he hit one ball 113.9 mph and another 113.6 mph, both well above his previous career high of 112.5 mph. Third, Varsho’s 90th-percentile exit velocity is faster too. At 107.7 mph, it’s a full tick and a half faster than his previous mark of 106.2 mph in 2023. I pulled every ball Varsho has hit over 105 mph in his entire career. So far, 7% of his tracked batted balls have come this season. If he were crushing the ball at the same rate as usual, we’d expect that 7% of his batted balls over 105 mph have come this season too. Instead, that number is 15%. It’s more than twice as high. We’re still talking about a small sample, but this is something to watch. Varsho really might be more powerful than he was before.