Claudio Vargas

[Matthew Trueblood]

Go back to 1970, when the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee and rebranded themselves as the Brewers, and their starting pitchers are just about the least dominant in the game. The only two franchises with a lower strikeout rate from their starters than the Crew has in the last five-plus decades are the Royals and Orioles. To many young Brewers fans, this might seem surprising--indeed, almost unimaginable--but they're traditionally been roughly the most pitch-to-contact team in the game.

Things began to change with Ben Sheets, and that change seemed to gain a firmer foothold with the arrival of Yovani Gallardo. Over the last half-decade, with Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, and Freddy Peralta, the Brewers have had perhaps the most dominant starting pitchers in baseball. That word--"dominant"--never seemed to belong in the same sentence with Brewers starters before that, but now, it does.

Right around the time of Sheets and Gallardo, though, the Crew also had guys like Claudio Vargas. In 2007, Vargas made 23 starts for a team that came up just shy in the race for the NL Central. His ERA was ugly (5.09), but he went 11-6 that year. It was his only stint as a Milwaukee starter, but he would return for a very successful run as a reliever in 2009--and then a much less successful, career-ending one in 2010. 

In May of 2007, though, Vargas started against the Washington Nationals. He started that contest by getting a flyout, then a groundout, then another flyout. In the second frame, he started with a flyout and another groundout, before Brian Schneider lined a single. Vargas would go on to pitch six innings of one-run ball that day.

Here's why it's significant: in his career, spanning 114 starts, that's the deepest into a game Vargas ever carried a perfect game. He got twice as close to a no-hitter, as many as 10 outs before giving up his first hit in an outing. Since 1974, 708 pitchers have made at least 100 starts. Vargas is the only one who never once got through two clean innings to open things, and the only one to never get past 3 1/3 innings before surrendering a knock.

That's extraordinary, but it's also typical, and not in a bad way, per se. No, Vargas wasn't an electric arm, and no, his one season as a starter with the Crew wasn't a star turn. He was a nice back-end option for a team trying to fight its way through the season, though, and more to the point, he was characteristic. Like Brewers starters throughout the franchise's history--like Jerry Augustine and Don August, like Jim Slaton and Jeff D'Amico--Vargas wasn't nasty. He didn't overwhelm or overpower hitters, though his stuff was more interesting when he came back as a reliever in 2009. He was reliant on the defense behind him, to such an extent that he never so much as turned over a lineup once before allowing a baserunner. 

He was valuable, though, because he was versatile, available, and viable, when other options were not. After he'd lost his rotation spot in 2007, in a Sept. 18 game in Houston, Vargas had to come on after just one inning of work from Sheets. The Crew's ace left with hamstring tightness and wouldn't pitch again that season. The Astros already had a one-run lead when Vargas took the bump, but he worked four scoreless frames, while the lineup exploded for six runs. He wasn't dominant, even that day, but Vargas could be good, and he had a knack for preventing opponents from stringing together their hits and running him out of the game.

The 2007 season came to a bitter end, in no small part because of Sheets's injuries. Vargas wasn't good enough to stop the gap for the fortnight left in that campaign; just for a few emergency innings. Still, he did yeoman's work, and as the Brewers look ahead to a season without two of the three dominant pitchers who had defined them for the last several years, Vargas is an exemplar of the way the team has often succeeded by finding starters who were just good enough.

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