It’s Ildemaro Vargas Time In Major League Baseball

These are all decent enough reasons for Waterloo not to write about Ildemaro Vargas, and there are others. The next paragraph started with the word But. Waterloo was writing about Vargas in the context of players who were likely to be available on fantasy waiver wires but could deliver some short term help; among the good reasons to avoid such a topic that Waterloo did not mention re: not wanting to write about Ildemaro Vargas is that the last few weeks have marked the only time in parts of ten MLB seasons when Vargas could conceivably not have been on fantasy waiver wires. Vargas, whose 27-game hitting streak ended in the first o-fer of his season on Saturday, dropping his average down to a MLB-best .388, has won his decade in the bigs on versatility, vibes, and the reliable delivery of something like the Great Value Brand version of Luis Arraez's offensive loadout—very few walks and even fewer strikeouts, a ton of al dente contact on pitches in but frequently outside the strike zone. This sort of player is very valuable to actual MLB teams—Vargas is in his third stint with the Diamondbacks—but not really in a way that provides meaningful professional stability. Vargas was signed by Arizona out of an independent league in 2015; before he became teammates with Sean Burroughs and Prentice Redman on the Bridgeport Bluefish, Vargas had done a six-year hitch in the Cardinals' system that topped out with eight games at Double-A. When the Diamondbacks signed him, he was 23 and had an OPS that started with a 6 in the Atlantic League. He was in the Majors by 2017. That Vargas has played in parts of every season since undersells how precarious his big-league life has been. The Diamondbacks traded him for cash in 2020 and reacquired him for cash in 2021; he played for the Twins, Cubs, and Pirates in the interim. Vargas's numbers generally looked better the more he played, but he never played that much and with the exception of a 2022 season split between the Cubs (again) and Nationals he was never within shouting distance of league average. There is probably some correlation, there.