Jersey Guy Sports

339 - The Yankees Call Up Anthony Volpe and It Makes No Sense

• Don Signorino

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The Yankees make a move that should be routine, and it instantly turns into a litmus test for whether this team has learned anything. With Caballero headed to the injured list, New York calls up Anthony Volpe and I can’t hide my frustration, because it feels like the fastest route back to the same problems: too many strikeouts, not enough contact, and a shortstop situation that gets graded on vibes instead of results.

I walk through why Volpe’s profile worries me, from a .222 career batting average to a style of hitting that doesn’t translate when the Yankees face good pitching and every run has to be manufactured. We get into situational hitting, why “just put the ball in play” matters with runners on, and how bunting and shortening up are missing tools on a roster that too often swings for the fences in the wrong counts. I also dig into baserunning, because being fast is not the same as creating value, and bad reads and hesitation can kill innings just as quickly as a strikeout.

From there, the conversation widens into the bigger organizational question: are the Yankees truly running a meritocracy? I talk about Aaron Boone’s comments, Brian Cashman’s messaging, the temptation of recency bias, and what this choice says about alternatives like George Lombard Jr. I even touch the “scholarship” issue at catcher, because consistency in roster logic matters if the team is serious about winning as the core ages toward a 2026 championship push.

Subscribe, share the show with a Yankees fan who will argue back, and leave a review with your take: should Volpe keep the job when Caballero returns?

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Welcome And The Volpe Call-Up

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Welcome to Jersey Guy Sports, your sports talk home for the Yanks, Giants, Knicks, Rangers, and the Rutgers, Charlotte Knights. And I'm your host, Don. I want to thank you for listening. Today I'm going to be talking about the New York Yankees who called up Anthony Volpe. As things go from bad to worse for the Yanks. So let's go ahead and get started. Well, my least favorite New York Yankee is back with the Major League Club. The Yankees called up Anthony Volpe today. Apparently, Caballero has a slight fracture in his finger and was put on the IL. And as a result, instead of seeing what George Lormborough Jr. might have, the Yankees decided our best bet is to call up the ongoing disaster that has won Anthony Volpe. Volpe, as you all know, has had one good spring training in his rookie year. And on the basis of that one good spring training, has basically been anointed prince and future ruler of Yankee shortstop land and has been the Yankee's shorting start starting shortstop for the last three years. I'm so pissed off right now that I can't even speak. Now, this, despite Volpe being basically an awful hitter, he's a 222 career hitter. He's a poor shortstop. He has a below average arm. This despite having some speed, he also really has not shown that he can effectively steal bases. He doesn't get great jumps, he has a stupid hopping lead that almost never works anymore, nor does he have any good base running sense in general. And if you watch Volpe for the last three years, he makes stupid base running decisions. He goes back when he should try to take an extra base. Instead of going first to third on a single or first to home on a double, he misjudges where the ball is, doesn't get a good jump, heads back to first. All these silly, stupid, non-instinctual base running plays that Volpe does, right? He's not a great base runner. That is not to say he's not fast, because he is fast and he's young, right? And he can steal some bases, but he is nothing compared to Caballero on the base pass, that's for sure. Caballero stole 50 bases last year in a part-time role. Volpe, I don't think, has ever stolen more than 25, and that's playing 160 games a year. So A, Volpe doesn't ever really get on base because his batting sucks, and B, when he is on base, he doesn't steal bases like he should, and he is not a good instinctual base runner. And I think that hurts the team. And I think for someone that's a small, quick guy like he is, to not be an effective base runner and or a base stealer is really a detriment to the New York Yankees. In addition, you know, when you look at his hitting, and the reason I don't want him up here is he strikes out way too much. He swings way too hard. He has not shown he can even consistently get a bunt down, God forbid, like most Yankees, but again, young, fast guy that doesn't generally have a lot of power. You should be able to bunt, right? Caballero can bunt. Few other Yankees can bunt, not many of them. You would think Volpe that would be something in his arsenal, but he's not shown that he can even consistently properly lay down a bunt. And Volpe is yet another Yankee that cannot situationally hit or chooses not to situationally hit. And on the last podcast, I talked a lot about that, right? Another Yankee that just can't get the bass on the ball when the situation requires it. And when we play good pitchers, we face good pitchers, you know, who are on good teams, a lot of times you're not going to score five, six, seven runs. You're going to need to get that runner from second to third. You're going to need to get that runner that's on third into home, maybe without a hit, maybe get a fly ball, maybe hit a ground ball towards second. Just don't strike out, right? And Anthony Volpe is another player that simply can't avoid just striking out, just getting the bat on the ball. Too much strikeouts, not enough contact. And specifically with Volpe, again, in big spots where you just don't want him to strike out. Just try to be a little bit of a situational hitter, choke up on the bat, you know, maybe go to the other way, cut down on your swing, just try to situationally hit. You know, Bellinger does that all the time. You see him consistently cutting down a swing. Caballero does that a little bit, and maybe a few others, but very, very few of the Yankees do that. I think Paul Goldschmidt does that too. And, you know, I want to give Volpey a little bit of credit because I am I am probably one of the biggest Volpe haters, and I've been screaming about him for years, but he has had a few very big Yankee moments, and that's for sure. I mean, he had a friggin' grand slam in the World Series. There are very, very few people in the world that can say they did that. And he had a few other big moments for the Yankees, but that's it. And those moments for his supporters seem to carry this extraordinary weight and this lobsided amount of you know goodwill because people tend to sort of selectively remember what they want to about Volpe. He did these few good things, he had that great spring training, he had this wonderful run of two weeks in the middle of this season, or he did this one thing in this one playoff game. But it's this, I think, inability for Boone, the Yankees, Cashman, their management, and the Yankees as a whole, and sometimes the fans, the lack of ability to sort of step back and look at a player at a whole as a whole. And you see that he has a 222 career average. You see that he never really steals bases. You watch him play and look at the eye test, watch him play shortstop. He is not a good major league shortstop. He boots balls, he doesn't have great range, his arm is below average. And I don't care whether the metrics tell me he's good or bad, unless you told me he was very bad, but other years they told me he was good. I mean, somehow he won a frigging gold glove when he was a rookie year, and he was fine, but he was not a great shortstop. The metrics don't matter, good or bad. Watch him play every day, and you will see he is just not even an average major league shortstop. He's not. And again, in the short term, he can certainly look fine and sometimes very good, right? And I think again, that's what some people take. He'll come up here, the Yanks will put him in, he'll play, you know, a week or two, and what happens in that stretch, people will make determinations on, as if he hasn't played three other full seasons with the Yankees. I mean, he's played close to 500 Major League Baseball games, right? To say he oh, look, look at him in this six-game stretch, right game stretch. We have 500 games to look at, people. So, so look at them. Use your eyes, use your real memory, not just your selective memory, and think about how bad this guy is and why the hell we called him up. And I know that despite the Yankees being somewhat different this year, that the Yankees still, in my mind, feel like he is the one for the shortstop. And they're saying all the right things at this point, right? But the Yankees this year have tried to do things, you know, a little bit differently. They've been giving hints, right? That there were going to be an actual meritocracy this year, right? It seemed for a while, like this year, the Yankees were going to reward playing well, and not birthright people into a spot. We previously talked about Caballero playing short, at least for a little while, rice starting every day at first base, even when there's lefties. Uh we talked about promoting George Lombard Jr. quickly to AAA, you know, which is something the Yankees always like to slow roast all their good prospects. God forbid you actually move with any kind of haste whatsoever, right? They sent Luis Hill right down to the miners when he wasn't pitching well because he was a little bit of a golden child pitcher for a while, right? So they seem to be hesitating less this year and rewarding meritocracy a little bit. And I've talked about that on previous podcasts. Even though, you know, Cashman gets to the mic and says, no, no, it's the same as always. It's not, it hasn't been the same as always quite this year. The exception to that is Austin Wells, who is a disaster as a catcher, somehow possibly maybe worse than Volpe at short, is Wells as a catcher, just a disgustingly horrible hitter, who the Yanks do seem to have still on scholarship. Well, he's going to be our starting catcher. Nobody can explain why, but he is the one exception. The rest of the cases that I mentioned before, you know, and even having Volpe down in the minors for a while after he was hurt, do speak to the Yankees having a different urgency, a different take on who starts and who plays, and somewhat of a real meritocracy this year. You know, and to be fair, you know, even though I can't understand why Lombard Jr. isn't up here right now as the backup, you know, instead of Volpe, to be fair, Boone was quoted, apparently, according to Michael Kay today on the Yankee game, as saying that whenever Caballero does get off the IL, that the shortstop job will be Caballero's again. Now that's apparently what Boone said. And if true, this is a really good thing. But we will see. I have my doubts. I'm not sure that that will be the case. God forbid Volpe plays well for a week or two, because as I said, people tend to have short-term memory. There is a very high chance that if Volpe has one good series, one good week, that's what everybody's memory of Volpe will be. And their memory of him as a player for three years is going to vanish. And it's natural, right, for fans and for managers and for writers to have a certain recency bias. And everybody knows what that is, right? We tend to put more importance and have a clearer memory of how someone or something happens that is recent, right? And if someone has had a good week, right, it's natural to sort of forget what happened the month before because they are hot, right? They're playing well this second, right? And so there is a built-in recency bias, I think, to everyone. It is almost impossible to not have a recency bias. But if you are considering what to do at shortstop, and you really need to try to work towards building a championship team in 2026 where Judge is 34 and getting older, and Cole is 35 and getting older, and Rodon is not young, and Stanton is just older and breaking down by the day, right? There's not a lot more years in this core group. Right? There just isn't. And if we need to get something done soon, we can't dick around anymore, right? We cannot screw around and you know give Volpe a fourth or fifth terrible season. We cannot continue to have Austin Wells bet 150, 200, 203, you know, not throw anyone out, but just, ah, he's a good framer, that Wellsy. And, you know, we cannot have that, right? If if we're choosing to be a meritocracy, to play with urgency because we don't have a lot of years left for our best players, then we have to be hard. And that means we have to not have recency bias, work through that, and take a look at the big picture, trade people that we need to, sit people that we need to, call up people that we need to, and not have fucking Anthony Volpe starting shortstop for the rest of the 2026 season because that is going to piss me the hell off. If I have to look at his face for another hundred games this year, it's going to bother the hell out of me. And it's going to go against what has been a decent decision-making early start to the season for Yankee management. I mean, this was the last thing that I wanted to see this early in the season. It's a shame Caballero got injured. I think the Yankees had other options at shortstop, including Lombard Jr. We will see, though, how serious the Yankees are about actually having no one on scholarship, having no one birthrighted to positions. I mean, we already know the falsity of it when we look at the catching position. But the question is, you know, when Calbert returns, how sure are all of you that Volpe will not remain the starting shores top? Knowing Boone, knowing the Yanks like I do, I'm not sure at all, but you know, the reality is a little bit depressing. But we we can always hope, right? And let's hope they come to their senses and we'll see how it goes. And I know this is a very long podcast about a one call up and the Yankees, but they've been losing. They've been showing their true colors again against good pitching, their lack of hitting, and just calling a Volpe is not going to help that situation at all. Anyway, that's gonna do it for the podcast. Thank you for listening to Jersey Guy Sports. Please subscribe to the podcast. Please tell your friends all about it, and I will be back soon with some more sports talk. Thanks and have a good day.

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Don Signorino

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