2025 Player Preview: Anthony Volpe
Is the third time the charm for the former top prospect?
Heading into the 2023 season, the biggest question about Anthony Volpe was whether or not he had the glove to stick at shortstop. Most were confident that he would hit, hit for at least some power, and add value on the basepaths - but his ability to handle the six was very much in doubt. And if you had told any Yankees fan that Volpe would be one of the best defenders in the entirety of Major League Baseball two years later, they would’ve believed he was among the best players in the sport. Instead, he has been well below-average with the bat, and has been far closer to good than great overall.
After two full seasons, Volpe is a below-average hitter - and I don’t mean overall. The soon to be 24-year-old is below-average for his position. Let’s take a look at how he compares to the average shortstop thus far:
Volpe - .228/.288/.373, 7.3% BB, 25.0% K, .145 ISO, .284 BABIP, 84 wRC+
All SS - .251/.314/.406, 7.5% BB, 21.7% K, .154 ISO, .299 BABIP, 99 wRC+
If you want to try to handwave some of the difference away, it’s clear that BABIP plays a part in this. Volpe’s walk rate and power (viewed through the lens of ISO) is fairly close to the norm, whereas his .284 BABIP is a tick below the normal league-average of .300ish. That doesn’t quite work, though, when you look at his first two years in isolation:
2023 - .209/.283/.383, 8.7% BB, 27.8% K, .174 ISO, .259 BABIP, 82 wRC+
2024 - .243/.293/.364, 6.1% BB, 22.6% K, .121 ISO, .303 BABIP, 86 wRC+
Volpe had a roughly average BABIP in 2024, and was effectively the same hitter as viewed through the purview of wRC+. It isn’t quite that simple, though, as his slight increase in production was entirely batting average-based, as he walked a fair bit less and hit for far less power. The latter is quite easy to understand:
Volpe stopped pulling the ball and stopped hitting the ball in the air, and both are prerequisites to hitting for power. Such drastic variance cannot be simple chance, either; this was a change in approach, with an emphasis placed on contact above quality of contact. Volpe’s swing rate was identical across both seasons, yet his contact rate jumped by nearly six percentage points. Why? He was taking something off of his swing:
Unfortunately, that more contact-oriented swing yielded much poorer results (outside of the realm of batting average). To wit:
2023 - 9.0% barrel rate, 88.7 MPH exit velocity, 43.0% hard hit rate
2024 - 3.9% barrel rate, 87.7 MPH exit velocity, 35.4% hard hit rate
Put that all together, and Volpe’s xwOBA dropped from .308 to .278 year over year. And, far more staggeringly, his xwOBACON (wOBA on contact) dropped from .385 to .329. League-average, for reference, is .368. All told, despite the far more palatable batting average, Volpe regressed as a hitter in 2024.
In my mind, the key to Volpe’s performance is figuring out who he is as a hitter. If he can somehow combine the strengths of 2023 and 2024, we could see a fairly seismic leap forward in 2025. Some quick napkin math suggests .250/.330/.430 as a consolidation line, of sorts, which would have been a roughly 115 wRC+ last year - relatively close to Willy Adames. I don’t think that’s too far outside of the realm of possibility, as it is clear that Volpe is capable of making large-scale adjustments. He simply has to make the right ones.
His exit velocity jumped a bit in the playoffs, with pretty much everything else (swing%, swing length, etc) staying the same. I wonder if he made an adjustment.