Meet the Less-Vaultin’ Daulton Varsho

Daulton Varsho is a tinkerer. In each of his seasons with the Blue Jays, either SportsNet’s Arden Zwelling, SportsNet’s Shi Davidi, or both have written an article detailing a swing change – except in 2024, when Zwelling noted that for once, Varsho was going to finally try (gasp!) not tinkering with his swing.

Despite all the adjustments, Varsho remained the same kind of hitter. He had a super steep swing that was seemingly tailor made for today’s lift-and-pull focused game. He whiffed a lot and didn’t hit the ball particularly hard, but when he did square it up, he ripped it into the right field bleachers. That’s a recipe for a lot of variance – the lows involve scads of strikeouts and the highs involve heaps of homers – so it wasn’t surprising that his first three seasons with the Blue Jays saw one average season at the plate, one below-average season, and one above-average season. Although injuries limited him to just 71 games in 2025, Varsho put up a career-best 123 wRC+ and slugged 20 homers. Over a full season, that’s a 46-homer pace! If ever there was a time to stand pat, this was it, right? Right!?

Of course not. This March, SportsNet’s David Singh picked up the baton. Varsho is “trying to move away from his pull-heavy tendency and is instead aiming to hit the ball with authority to all fields.” Singh offered quite a few details to reinforce the intensity of the effort:

“That’s been a very different focus this spring than last,” Varsho said. “This spring I’ve been able to catch balls a little bit deeper and drive them to the opposite field.”

Varsho’s goal every time he swings is to drive the ball toward the pitcher’s feet. He feels that’s the best mental checkpoint he can deploy to produce line drives given his swing mechanics. The left-handed hitter has been sticking with that method this spring, only now he’s adjusting his aim to include areas to the left and right of the pitcher. 

So, for instance, instead of focusing on the pitcher’s feet, he might aim to send the ball to the left side of the mound, closer to third base. The intended result of that aim would be a hard-hit ball to left field. 

Varsho says this will ultimately make him a more versatile hitter who can better adjust on the fly to different locations and pitch types.

“It’s just going to open up a lot more pitches for me to hit instead of being like, OK, I see this pitch, but I can’t hit it.”

…

“I’ve been able to hit the ball to the opposite field a lot harder than I’ve done in the past, instead of cutting it and trying to push it that way,” said Varsho. 

He also isn’t worried about compromising home runs because of this new approach. That’s something Popkins has discussed with Varsho this spring. 

“Because those are naturally going to come,” said Varsho. “Homers come from misses. When I’m hitting the ball low on a line, like I’ve done this spring so far, I know that when we get to the games and I get a little tired, the loft is going to be a little bit more. I’m going to get underneath a couple of balls and those are going to be the homers. So, I’m not really searching for the home run swing. It’s in there.”

That’s a huge change that cuts to the very heart of who Varsho is as a hitter. It’s also a real surprise coming from David Popkins. I don’t want to pigeonhole him, but he came to Toronto from a Twins organization that was intensely focused on pulling the ball in the air. I noted at the time that it made him seem like just the right coach for a lifter-puller like Varsho, and then Varsho did indeed go out and put up the best offensive season of his career. Now they’re talking about abandoning that approach?

Despite the seeming improbability of it all, this change really has gone exactly as planned. Varsho’s pull and strikeout rates are down roughly 10 percentage points, and his fly ball rate is down even more. Want to see some lines trend sharply downward?

Varsho’s groundball, line drive, and zone contact rates are up nearly 10 percentage points. Want to see some lines trending upward?

A look at the bat tracking data confirms what we’d expect from these changes. Varsho is making contact deeper in the hitting zone, and his swing path has never been flatter or less angled toward the pull side. That involves a tradeoff. Because your bat speeds up on its way through the hitting zone, catching the ball deeper means reduced bat speed at the point of contact. Varsho’s drop-off there has been a huge 2.7 mph. Although his hard-hit rate isn’t that far from his career norms, his average exit velocity, 90th-percentile exit velocity, launch angle, and barrel rate are all at or near the lowest marks of his career. As a result, Varsho is running the lowest ISO of his career. He still pulls the ball in the air more than the average hitter, but that’s yet another rate that’s dropped by 10 percentage points.

You can see it in Varsho’s spray chart. The charts below show fastballs right over the middle of the plate that qualified as both hard hit and squared up. I picked them because I wanted to have an example of what happens when Varsho gets his ideal swing off, and even this early, the difference is clear:

The chart on the left shows 2023 through 2025. He ripped those balls into right field, resulting in lots of home runs and doubles. The chart on the right shows 2026, and as you can see, the new Varsho is totally different. He hits those balls back up the middle, toward the deepest part of the ballpark, where homers are hard to come by.

I told you this cut to the heart of who Varsho was as a hitter. Well, this really is a totally new Varsho, and at least so far, it’s working. Varsho isn’t running back his 2025 season, but he is running a 106 wRC+, tied for the second-highest mark of his career. He’s also running a better-than-average strikeout rate for the first time in his life, which means that things aren’t quite so feast or famine. You can see it in his 15-day rolling wRC+:

Varsho hasn’t hit the highs of the previous seasons, but he hasn’t hit the lows either. Time will tell whether this version of Varsho sticks. If history is any guide, he’ll be back with an entirely new plan next year. As for whether you prefer this new version of Varsho, I think it depends on whether or not he can maintain this moderately above-average performance. Last season was just the second of Varsho’s entire career in which he notched a wRC+ above 100. If these changes help him stay in that neighborhood more consistently, he’ll be a different player, and it’s probably worth trading some home runs and strikeouts for a some line drives.

We’re going to close with Varsho’s defense. Despite debuting for the Diamondbacks as a catcher slash outfielder, Varsho has been one of the best outfielders (and fielders, period) in the game since the moment he arrived in Arizona. According to our numbers, he’s been worth 43.3 runs on defense and 8.3 runs on offense (10.3 on the bases and -2 at the plate). He’s always had enough power to make you dream on a great offensive season, but defense is the thing that’s kept him afloat throughout all the offensive struggles. This season, however, things look different. Look how they massacred my boy:

It’s early to be reading into these numbers, but according to both FRV and DRS, Varsho’s defense is no longer superhuman. Instead, it’s average, or just a bit above average. A quick look at Varsho’s Statcast numbers isn’t especially encouraging. After spending his entire career with a sprint speed between 28 and 29 mph, he’s fallen to 27.2 this season. His home-to-first times have gotten worse as well, and most concerningly, his outfield jumps now grade out as exactly average. Varsho never possessed elite speed, but he had fantastic jumps and he was excellent at closing on the ball. But this year, he has average jumps and slightly below-average speed, at least so far. It’s all a bit scary. If Varsho can’t be a great outfielder, then he’s really going to have to hit in order to make an impact. Still, I think there are a few reasons for (cautious) optimism here.

First, Varsho suffered with a minor knee injury on April 17. It only cost him a couple of games, but we don’t know much about it. It’s entirely possible that it’s still hampering him to some degree, and that he’ll get healthier at some point in the future. Next, Varsho hasn’t been given that many chances to show what he can do. Let me pull a quote from an article I wrote back in 2022:

We often talk about the variability of defensive metrics, but it’s possible we don’t spend enough time on why. Myles Straw led all outfielders with 371 putouts in 2022. Pull in catch probability figures, and we can see that just under 80% of those were certain outs. Straw saw 114 starred chances, fourth-most in the league, but those were just 27% of his 429 total chances. Batters can make as many as 700 plate appearances in a year; 114 outfield chances is a much smaller sample.

Those chances matter, and the ball just isn’t being hit Varsho’s way as often. The Blue Jays pitching staff is running a higher strikeout rate and a significantly higher groundball rate in 2026 than it did last year. Last year, 225 total air balls (fly balls, line drives, and popups) were hit to Varsho in center, or or 4.1 per game. This year, that number is 203, or 3.9 per game.

That may not seem like much of a dip, but the chances Varsho has been seeing aren’t setting him up for success either. As you’ll likely remember, Statcast assigns each ball hit to an outfielder a catch probability based on the hang time and the distance needed to make the play. Most balls are cans of corn that don’t affect anybody’s grades one way or another. Statcast splits the remaining balls into categories, awarding stars based on their level of difficulty. When you’re a good defender, you want more starred chances, because they’re an opportunity to show off your skills. Well, last year, Varsho averaged just over one starred chance per nine innings; this season, he’s at 0.7 chances per nine. In other words, once every three games, he misses out on a play that could help him demonstrate his defensive value.

And the rabbit hole gets deeper! The makeup of those chances has also changed. Varsho has never had the top-end speed to make too many five-star catches. He really separates himself from other outfielders on four-star chances, balls with a catch probability between 26% and 50%. This year, he’s only seen one of those (and because his shortstop was charging hard, he peeled off and didn’t try to make the catch). Varsho has converted all of his three-star opportunities, and he’s even converted one five-star opportunity, but missing out on four-star opportunities has really hurt his ability to rack up defensive value.

To be clear, I’m still concerned about the reduced sprint speed and the worse jumps. I’m very concerned, in fact. But it’s still early, and a lot could change if and when Varsho gets the chance to track down some more gappers. You can only catch what they hit at you, and so far, they haven’t hit all that much.

Put all this together – the new swing, the suspicious defensive downturn – and it’s a lot of uncertainty for one of Toronto’s core players. Until going 1-for-9 over his last three games, he was tied with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. as Toronto’s most valuable position player (he’s now down to fourth). We still have a lot of baseball to play. If Varsho keeps hitting and it turns out that this defensive downturn really was just because of a short-term injury or a paucity of three-and four-star chances, he could help fuel a playoff push. But if the defensive downturn is real, this new swing needs to keep working.