Miguel Vargas was almost out of the picture on April 18. He went 0-for-4 with two walks against the Athletics in West Sacramento, watched his average fall to.153 and left behind a game the White Sox would lose 7-6 in 11 innings after blowing a five-run lead.
Since that night, Vargas has turned into one of the sharpest hitters in the sport. He is hitting.324/.457/.635 with a 200 wRC+ since April 18, a mark tied with Aaron Judge for the fifth-best in baseball. He homered in each of the first three games of this stretch and was feet away from his 10th home run of the season on Wednesday, when the White Sox beat the Royals and moved back to.500.
The timing matters because the White Sox have ridden the same run. They are 15-8 since that loss to Oakland, and their climb has happened alongside Vargas's breakout rather than apart from it. The team's victory over Kansas City on Wednesday night left Chicago even on the season, a place that looked distant when Vargas's average sat in the.150s and the club was staring at another ugly collapse.
That swing has not come out of nowhere. Vargas has had a longer and less exciting major league track record, with more false starts than sustained runs, and he has been overshadowed locally by Munetaka Murakami and Colson Montgomery. For much of his career, he has been the player people waited on rather than the player driving a team forward. The past few weeks have changed that, at least for now.
There is still a hard edge to the story. Vargas's surge has come in a stretch that began with a miserable night and a box score that looked like it could bury him, and the question is not whether he has produced lately. It is whether this version of Vargas is the one the White Sox can count on once the hits stop falling and the homers stop landing just short of the fence.
