DUNEDIN, Fla. — Daulton Varsho‘s off-season project list back home in Wisconsin included redoing the area around his barn. The plan was to tarp the building off, dig up surrounding rocks and move them elsewhere on his 80-hectare property.
But with his right arm in a sling for six weeks after September rotator-cuff surgery, “I couldn’t do anything besides being on the tractor,” he says.
So, Varsho cleared out the area as best he could and then spent the rest of the winter focused on heavy lifting of a different sort, doing rehabilitation work three times a day along with most of his usual workouts.
Between difficulty sleeping, the overall recovery and the monotonous exercises aimed at restoring his full range of motion, it wasn’t much fun.
“Anybody who’s been through a rehab process like this, you know there are going to be bad days,” says the Toronto Blue Jays’ Gold Glove centre-fielder. “From those bad days, what can you take into understanding (of), what did I do well? So there were days where I was like, all right, I have to back off. I’m a person that’s always going to push it a little bit too much. Those days of, like, I just don’t feel better than the last time, it’s understanding, OK, this is why I’m feeling that way. And, so yeah, there were times where I wanted to say a lot of words that I probably shouldn’t say, but it was understanding what I needed to do to get to the point I am at right now, understanding it’s going to get better. It takes time.”
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The payoff for all that tedium begins Friday, when Varsho is slated to see his first action of the spring as the designated hitter when the Blue Jays host the Detroit Tigers in their first of two split-squad games on the docket.
For now, his action will be limited to hitting, as only in recent days has he cleared thresholds for baserunning, sliding and diving into bags. The main remaining obstacle to being ready for centre field on opening day is his throwing, which he’s now doing up to 120 feet.
The distance he’s throwing to is somewhat secondary, as what really matters for the moment is “the intensity,” the element that gets tested during games.
“You’re trying to get intensity so that when you do back up, you’re not using the bigger muscles, you’re using your rotator cuff again, your labrum, to be able to finish and be able to do what I want to do, spin the ball correctly, instead of pushing it,” he explains. “We’ll eventually get to where we need to stretch it out.”
The 28-year-old is being patient and methodical in rebuilding his arm, reeling in his natural tendency to max-effort everything he does.
Of course, the rehab process also forced that mindfulness upon him, which, amid the many frustrations he’s experienced over the past five months, has helped him build coping skills that should come in handy during the season’s inevitable ebbs and flows.
“One hundred per cent,” says Varsho. “This process helped me slow down with my swing, understand my moves a little bit more, understand my mechanics. I took it for granted that I was doing certain things. Like understanding how to throw a baseball correctly – you’re reteaching yourself how to throw. Hitting in the box, what are the moves I’m doing, so that when I go through funks during a season, I have something to go back to, slow me back down and this is what I need to do, A, B and C, to be able to get through it. The rehab helped me helped me with, it’s OK to relax and reset and get back to being grounded and normal.”
Since the Blue Jays acquired him from Arizona in December 2022 for catcher Gabriel Moreno and outfielder Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Varsho has sought ways to pair more offence with his nearly peerless defence. Last season, he batted .214/.293/.407 with 18 homers, which was similar to his .220/.285/.389 with 20 home runs line from 2023, but was also 14 per cent better relative to the league based on OPS+ (up to 98 from 84).
Injuries offer athletes natural periods for reflection and Jays manager John Schneider points out that “whenever the game is taken away, you can be sorry for yourself or you can think about ways you want to improve — Daulton definitely did the latter.”
Schneider initially feared the rehabilitation would steal the opportunity to work on his swing, but Varsho restarted baseball activity in December and was taking half-swings off the tee the week before Christmas. He reported to the Player Development Complex in the second week of January, a near-normal progression for him.
“He talks with his dad (former big-leaguer Gary Varsho) quite a bit and understood that he needed to change a couple things and have a little bit of a different feel in the box,” says Schneider. “He’s going about it the right way and he’s learned a lot about himself.”
The insight gained into how his body works is something Varsho believes puts him in a much stronger position compared to the past couple of seasons.
He now has “some simple cues for myself, knowing that my hands are going to start my swing and if my left hand works correctly, I’m going to be above the baseball, trusting what I do the best.”
And there’s trust, too, that his shoulder is going to hold up through the grind. During his first live batting practice, he swung and foul-tipped a pitch “and that was a checked box, knowing I can do it, it feels normal, there’s no worry behind it.”
“Ever since then,” he continues, “it’s like, ‘OK, I’m good.’”
The next checked box comes with his return to game action, with more tests to follow, as Varsho’s most important off-season project, his recovery from shoulder surgery, nears completion.
