After Shoulder Surgery, Daulton Varsho Looks Like Daulton Varsho

Daulton Varsho has now gotten into two spring training games – his first game action since the rotator cuff injury that cut his 2024 season short and necessitated surgery – and he’s started off with a bang. Two of them, actually. As I write on Monday, Varsho has one walk, no strikeouts, and two hits – both of them home runs – in his six spring training playoff PAs. Yes, of course I’ll be happy to show them to you. Enjoy.

First of all, it’s a great sign that Varsho is ahead of schedule in his recovery and back hitting bombs. Further, I don’t know that you could pick two home runs that better encapsulate who he is as a hitter. The first one is an inside pitch, and it allows Varsho to do what he loves: turn on the ball. As I wrote last week, Varsho’s whole swing is geared toward pulling the ball in the air, and when a right-hander leaves a changeup hanging right over the middle of the plate like Olson Reese did here, it’s Christmas in February. If you watch it again, you’ll see Varsho lean back on the ball, which players only do when they’re really swinging comfortably. This is Varsho’s ideal swing. It’s amazing that it came in his first plate appearance after returning from surgery.

In its own way, the second homer is even more Varsho. It’s not his ideal swing, but it highlights his swing’s defining characteristic: it’s incredible steepness. Few players bring their barrel up through the zone at such an extreme angle. Varsho goes down and golfs a Taijuan Walker sweeper below the plate straight up in the air. The ball has an absurd launch angle of 45 degrees, and yet it just keeps on going. This is a rare feat; through the entire 2024 season, just nine home runs were hit at such an extreme launch angle. This is who Varsho is. He launches the ball.

But neither of those is the swing that I really want to talk about. So far, Varsho has put five balls into play: two homers and three groundouts. Unsurprisingly, the homers came on slower pitches that gave Varsho time to go out and attack the ball in front of the plate, the secret to pull-side power. Two of the three groundouts were fastballs that didn’t give Varsho time to get his arms extended, and one other a curveball that just plain fooled him. Once again, all of this tracks. He likes to go out and yank the ball toward right field, and that’s easier to do on a slower pitch. When he can’t catch up, he’ll roll over the ball and groundout to the pull side. But one of those groundouts was not like the others.

I know this doesn’t look like much, but Varsho hit this ball 109.4 mph. That's not just extremely hard; it's tied for the 17th-hardest ball of his entire career. Keep in mind that he’s still recovering from shoulder surgery, and keep in mind that shoulder injuries tend to sap hitters’ power. There was never any guarantee that he would be able to swing quite as hard coming back from this injury. Varsho is not all the way back, not by any stretch a sure thing to be in the lineup on Opening Day, and yet he just hit one of the hardest balls of his entire career. I know this was a routine groundout, and I know everyone’s excited that his rehab is ahead of schedule, but this is more exciting. It’s one of the best signs we could’ve gotten about where Varsho is and who he’ll be when he gets back. Varsho still has plenty of work to do to make himself a productive hitter and all-around star, but power is a huge part of his game. Knowing that he can still reach top-end exit velocity means that we can still dream on that star potential, in 2025 and beyond.