Miguel Vargas Has Been Abducted and Replaced by a Replicant. I Hope the Old Version Never Comes Back.

One of my favorite sticks to beat the White Sox with (and over the past few years, there have been plenty) has been the Erick Fedde trade of 2024.

You know the one: Chicago was en route to a record-breaking number of losses, and with the season in the tank, GM Chris Getz flipped three of his best-performing players — Michael Kopech, Tommy Pham, and Fedde — in a three-way deal with the Cardinals and Dodgers. The 2024 White Sox were enduring a lost season that redefined the term; trading those guys was obviously the right thing for Getz to do. My objection was the return.

The headliner for the White Sox was Miguel Vargas, who at the time was the Dodgers’ second-best utility infielder named Miguel, behind a 35-year-old for whom the Marlins had no need. The Dodgers not only got Kopech, they managed to finagle Tommy Edman, the best player in the deal, as well. Kopech immediately slotted in as a leverage reliever, Edman won NLCS MVP, and the Dodgers won the World Series.

Vargas did not leave a big hole with the Dodgers; he played 128 games there over three seasons and hit .201/.294/.364. By the time of the trade, he was mostly playing left field, and he was two tenths of a win below replacement level for his career. His first taste of life in Chicago was even worse. In 42 games through the rest of 2024, Vargas hit .104/.217/.170, good for -1.2 WAR. That’s a shocking figure in so short a period of time.

He was better in 2025 — short of opening a vial of nerve gas during a mound visit, he could hardly have been worse — but .234/.316/.401 with below-average corner infield defense only got Vargas to 1.4 WAR in 138 games. Good enough to start on a bad team (which is what he did), but not indicative of future star potential.

Here’s something that is indicative of star potential: In his first 46 games of 2026, Vargas is hitting .241/.366/.494. A player who was below replacement level up until this point in his career has produced 1.7 WAR in less than two months. Over the past 30 days, he’s second in WAR among all position players in the major leagues. In that time, he’s hitting .309 with nine home runs in 26 games and as many walks as strikeouts.

I’ll put my cards on the table: Through the end of last season, I thought this guy flat-out stunk. And when a bad player puts up a white-hot performance in May, Occam’s Razor produces one explanation above all others: It’s a fluke. It’s batted ball luck, or weak competition, or something that’ll regress, perhaps quickly.

Vargas has indeed had fluky batted ball luck, but in the other direction. His .234 BABIP is among the 20 lowest in the league, and almost 30 points below what it was last year. He’s actually underperforming his xwOBA by 24 points. The red flags that I’d expect to be directing him back toward replacement level aren’t there.

That’s because Vargas has actually changed something about his game: He’s swinging the bat harder. A lot harder. If you have an advanced degree in physics or engineering, you’ve probably figured this out already, but swinging the bat faster makes the baseball travel faster, and farther:

With some of these newfangled Statcast metrics, it takes a while to internalize a baseline for what’s good. What’s the equivalent of a .350 OBP, for bat speed? So I’ll tell you this: Adding 3.1 mph of bat speed in one offseason is a huge deal. It’s the biggest year-over-year change this season, and the second-biggest year-over-year change since we got this data in 2023.

The only player who added more bat speed in one offseason? Brice Turang, between 2024 and 2025. You’ll remember how that story panned out.

Last year, Vargas’ bat speed was in the 25th percentile. Now it’s in the 70th percentile. And here’s the exciting part: There was actually one thing Vargas was really good at early in his career, and far from the bat speed compromising that ability, it’s compounded the gains he’s made.

Since 2024, Vargas has always had good plate discipline and an excellent swing path. Out of 341 hitters with at least 500 plate appearances since the start of 2024, Vargas has the 28th-lowest chase rate. His in-zone contact rage, 85.8%, is only a little above average, but that’s fine. He’s within a couple tenths of a percent of Juan Soto, Corey Seager, Pete Alonso, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

Vargas’ average attack angle has been at either 11 or 12 degrees over the past three seasons. That puts him smack in the middle of what Baseball Savant considers an ideal attack angle (between five and 20 degrees). That’s a bat path that leads to lots of hard line drives and fly balls. Since the start of 2024, Vargas has an ideal attack angle rate of 63.8%, which is the eighth-best figure in baseball. Over that same period, 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-side bias to his swing, which is good for a guy who puts the ball in the air that much — 350-foot fly balls to pull are home runs, while balls hit the same distance to dead center or the alleys are outs. His in-air pull rate over the past three seasons has been within a tenth of a percent of 23.0% each year. (The major league average is 16.8%.)

That sounds great, but Vargas’ hitherto mediocre power left him limited offensively. Last year, he produced 94 popups and fly balls with an exit velocity between 80 and 95 mph — the seventh-highest total in the league. He hit .054 (with an xBA of .032) on those balls. So the ball was going in the right direction, it just wasn’t going there quickly enough to do damage:

And as you can see, everything he was doing well before — the solid plate discipline, the launch angle, the high contact rate — has either been unaffected or improved slightly.

Vargas hasn’t changed much. He’s standing a couple degrees more open, and while he’s retained his leg kick, it looks like he’s dropping down more on his back leg, which is probably helping him explode forward as he swings:

Really, he’s taken a solid approach that was undone by a lack of power, and souped it up to the point where it works. (There’s a tenuous historical allegory about the development of the P-51 Mustang, specifically the decision to put a supercharged Rolls-Royce engine in the plane, but I’ll let you aviation buffs nod in acknowledgement without wasting everyone else’s time.)

There are still gaps in Vargas’ game. He doesn’t add much on the bases, and while it looks like he’ll stick at third base for now, he isn’t a great defender there. That said, I didn’t appreciate how attainable “best season by a 21st Century White Sox position player” is.

The Sox haven’t had a 5-WAR season by a position player since Yoán Moncada in 2019. They’ve had only two position player seasons of 4.0 WAR or better (Tim Anderson in 2021 and Luis Robert Jr. in 2023) in 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 are both running wRC+ figures of 140 or better; taking away the COVID-shortened 2020 season, the last White Sox hitter to do that was José Abreu in his rookie season. If Vargas keeps going like this, he isn’t going to turn the franchise around on his own or anything, but I’ll definitely stop mocking the White Sox for the Fedde trade.

All stats are through games on Monday, May 18.