Squaring up for Success: How Daulton Varsho Can Become a More Well-Rounded Player

The Toronto Blue Jays have mentioned on several occasions that “internal improvement” will go a long way to improve the 74-game win total they had in 2024. That statement is true for all 30 teams in baseball, and the Blue Jays are no exception. In fact, they had several players who underperformed their expectations. George Springer, Davis Schneider, Alejandro Kirk, Ernie Clement, Daulton Varsho, and Bo Bichette all made at least 300 plate appearances wile running a wRC+ below 100. If you include the 83 wRC+ that Andrés Giménez put up in Cleveland, that makes seven players; only the Chicago White Sox had more. That's not where you want to be, and it's simply not good enough for a team that says it has playoff aspirations. The good news is all seven of the aforementioned players are projected to be much better than they were last year, according to Steamer. Even if that doesn't come to pass, getting above-average production from at least five of those seven players will go a long way toward helping this team score more runs and ultimately compete for a Wild Card spot.

Varsho might be the most interesting of the bunch. His elite defence has made him one of the best outfielders in baseball. In fact, his 9.7 fWAR over the past three seasons ranks 14th among all outfielders, ahead of players like Christian Yelich, Teoscar Hernández, and Seiya Suzuki. It's pretty good company to be in. Varsho's bat has held him back. Despite hitting 38 home runs over the past two seasons, he has a combined 92 wRC+, making him 8% worse than the average hitter. These numbers are fine, but they pale in comparison to the 27 HRs and 106 wRC+ he put up in his final season in Arizona.

So what happened over the last few seasons? Is there hope that Varsho can take his offensive game to another level in 2025? To answer those questions, let's look back into the 2022 season and see what he did well. The first number that pops up is his 10.2% barrel rate, which was roughly three percentage points higher that year than any other year in his career. Barrels are the designation given to balls hit at an ideal combination of exit velocity and launch angle. In 2024, the typical barrel produced a .719 Batting Average and a 2.402 slugging percentage. Varsho's barrel rate dropped to 7.3% in 2023 and to 6.2% in 2024, which put him in the 31st percentile in baseball. Let's start with his batted ball profile:

Varsho has seen his flyball and popup rate increase dramatically over the last few seasons, while his line drive rate, normally a fairly volatile stat, has bounced up and down. Overall, the combination of fly balls and line drives (the balls that can end up as barrels) has stayed roughly the same, but it's clear that, like so many players in today's game, he's trying to get the ball in the air more. However, Varsho's popup rate is very concerning. In 2024, it was 18.2%, the highest of his career and the highest of any qualified player by a huge margin. Moreover, when Varsho does hit a fly ball or a line drive, he's not hitting the ball as hard as he used to. In 2021 and 2022, when Varshio hit one of those air balls, he had a 93.8-mph exit velocity and 55.8% hard-hit rate. Since he joined the Blue Jays, those numbers are 91.9 mph and 47.3%. Varsho may be getting carried away with trying to lift the ball.

Could a simple mechanical adjustment be the key to getting Varsho to square up the baseball more? Maybe! Thanks to Statcast's new bat tracking information, we know that he has solid bat speed. The problem is in his squared-up rate:

On a per-swing basis, Varsho squares the ball up less than nearly every player in baseball. If you look at how often he squares it up when he makes contact, he's dead last. There's a pretty clear connection here. Esteban Rivera has written about Varsho's attack angle over at FanGraphs. Varsho has turned himself into a master of lifting the ball; his 24.4-degree launch angle was the highest among all qualified players in 2024. However, the extremely steep bat angle necessary to hit virtually everything in the air also means that Varsho's bat doesn't spend much time on plane with the ball. He's not making much contact, and he's among the worst players in the league at making solid contact. In order to succeed at the plate, Varsho will likely need to strike a better balance in his attack angle.

That may be a big ask; hitting a round ball with a round bat is one of the hardest things to do in sports. New hitting coach David Popkins is coming from the Twins, who have for years been deeply committed to pulling the ball in the air, the exact thing that Varsho's swing is designed to accomplish. If Popkins can help Varsho strike that balance, barreling up the baseball just a little bit more, his offensive numbers could combine with his elite defence and above-average base running, to make the complete player we've been hoping for since Varsho's arrival in 2023. The Blue Jays don't even need Varsho to become elite at squaring up the ball. If he can just improve from worst in baseball to somewhere in the middle of the pack, then we should see both the batting average and the power numbers take a step forward this season. For a team expecting internal improvements, the star center fielder is a good place to start.