No matter how much the Braves stink it up sometimes, and even if they miss the playoffs due to Bryce Elder, their feast or famine inept offense, and their complete lack of willingness to improve at the trade deadline or by signing Trevor Bauer, fewer things will be sadder than this image of now-White Sox infielder, Miguel Vargas, staring off into the abyss after the White Sox had lost their 20th consecutive baseball game.
A little over a week ago, Vargas was suiting up for the first in the NL West Dodgers, probably living his best life. As being part of a Major League roster, his paychecks were probably getting nice and thick, and the team is so loaded with talent, that he was mostly a backup player anyway, living the American dream of sitting on a bench for the vast majority of every game, and at the most, getting a pinch-hit or pinch-run opportunity, or a Sunday start. Life in LaLa-Land was beautiful and sunny, and even if his minor league performance hadn’t yet caught up to the bigs, he had made it.
But then Vargas was traded to the Chicago White Sox; not just the worst team in the AL Central, they’re the worst team in all of baseball, and they were riding a lengthy losing streak, that had no light at the end of the tunnel of stopping. Aside from the trade that brough him to Chicago, anyone who had any inkling of a chance at stopping the bleeding were also getting shipped out, and the White Sox were undoubtedly raising the white flag on the season, and the organization’s only objective was to be able to field a team for the remainder of the games of the season, all while attempting to restore their farm system with assets and prospects from other teams via trade.
Originally, my knee-jerk reaction was that Vargas should suck it up and take solace in the fact that he’s still a major league player on a big league roster. He’s still getting paid major league money to play a kids game, and being moved to a team like the White Sox, should alleviate pretty much all pressure there could be to succeed, because the team has no pressure to actually win games; and it’s in these conditions where a guy like Miguel Vargas could flourish and raise his stock, and either get paid, or possibly get traded again, after the season, and escape from the Southside.
However, apparently Miguel Vargas is at a precariously early stage of his career that he kind of has a reason to be depressed and mopey over his situation. Being a pre-arbitration player, he’s making league minimum, which is still a ridiculous $775K to play baseball, it’s low enough to where he becomes a negligible risk of getting cut like a rounding error. And if his performance doesn’t show some improvement soon, the two prospects sent to Chicago with him also play the same positions he do, and they could very well leapfrog over him in the organizational hierarchy.
Above all else, he goes from sunny beautiful Los Angeles to the south side of Chicago. I don’t even know what their park is called nowadays, but I can’t imagine it’s improved at all from when it was The Cell™ AKA the worst ballpark in all of MLB in my own experiences. Sure, I’d wager that he’s not actually living on the south end of the city, but he still has to commute there for all his home games, and the Southside really is as shitty as it’s made to look in Shameless.
I’d be on the precipice of a breakdown if I were Miguel Vargas too, but at least there’s one possible silver lining to everything he’s going through – if the Dodgers actually do manage to not fuck up in the playoffs and miraculously win the World Series, then he is due a World Series ring too, because baseball is funny like that and even the slimmest of contributors get a share in the credit of a championship.
Either way, when I had the idea to write about Miguel Vargas, I originally thought along the lines of suck it up, buttercup, but then diving deeper into his financials and his performance statistics, I began to realize that he really did have a reason to be this sad, and that in itself is really sad, because professional athletes shouldn’t ever be sad, unless they’re losing critical championship-implication games, not some random August regular season scrap against another pitiful franchise like the A’s.
