Anthony Volpe should be able to improve in his second season
After having a solid season overall with 21 homers, 23 doubles and 24 steals in 159 games last season as a rookie, Anthony Volpe should be able to improve in his other stats where he underperformed in his sophomore season. He deservedly won the shortstop competition last season in spring training.
Since it is rare for a rookie to have more than 20 homers, more than 20 doubles and more than 20 steals, Volpe finished eighth in Rookie of the Year voting. His 3.3 WAR was higher than the sixth (Masataka Yoshida) and seventh place (Edouard Julien) finishers but Volpe’s average and OPS were much lower than Yoshida’s and Julien’s. Another positive about his rookie season besides his homers, doubles and steals was that he won a Gold Glove after coming into MLB being more known for his offense than his defense.
Besides his homers, doubles and steals, which were all impressive for a rookie, his stats that were not very good and should improve in the 2024 season were his .209 average, his .283 OBP, his 167 strikeouts, his .666 OPS and 81 OPS+, which is below league average. Raising his average and OBP will in turn improve is OPS+, and he should be able to improve all three of those categories based on his success in the minors and after how well he played in high school at Delbarton.
His high school coach said that he saw that his approach this spring training at the plate has been similar to how it was in the minors and in high school than how it was when he struggled with his batting average and OBP in his rookie season in 2023.
He was drafted drafted in the first round with the 30th pick by the Yankees in the 2019 draft out of high school in New Jersey and dominated at each level in the minors. He has many lofty credentials include playing in the 2022 Futures Game that’s for the best minor league prospects, being ranked the №5 prospect by Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com pre 2023 and the №8 overall prospect pre 2022.
In Volpe’s first full minor league season in 2021 (2019 he played at short season Pulaski), he had 27 homers, 35 doubles, 86 RBI, 33 steals, a .294 average and a .423 OBP in 109 games. In his second and final minor league season last year in which he played a total of 132 games with 110 of those coming at Double-A and 22 at Triple-A, he had 21 homers, 35 doubles, 65 RBI, a very impressive 50 steals, a .249 average and a .342 on-base percentage. Overall in the minors, including his 34 games in 2019, he had a solid .263 average, a very impressive .376 OBP, a .505 slugging percentage and a .881 OPS.
It is likely that his average and OBP will be a good bit closer to his minor league numbers than they were last season since he now has a year of experience in MLB and he will be able to more use the approach that he used in the Yankees minor league system and his approach that got him to be a first round draft pick. He will likely start the year as the number nine hitter but if and when he shows that he can get on base at a high-rate, he will likely get more and more at-bats as the leadoff hitter depending on the starting pitcher.
Volpe has had more of an all-fields approach and has cleaned up his swing path during this spring training. He said that he is going to have more of a line drive approach at the plate, which should lead to a higher batting average and a higher batting average on balls in play (BABIP). These adjustments should be able to improve his success rate against high fastballs, which he struggled with last season.
These adjustments are geared to helping him improve at the plate in the regular season but he is off to a very good start with this now approach as these are his stats through eight spring training games: .400 average (8–20) with one double, one triple, two RBI, three walks and a .478 on-base percentage.
It is likely that with the new approach with his swing that he is having in spring training and that he will have in the regular season, he will be able to improve his average and on-base percentage while having a similar or likely even more doubles and homers next season. Aaron Boone did not think this new approach have any effect on his power numbers or his extra base hits.
Volpe said on March 6 that he has trained to hopefully be able to play 162 games. He impressively came very close last year playing in 159 games as a rookie.
“Going through the whole offseason, that is what I trained for and what I prepared for,” Volpe said about trying to play every game. “I just want to be physically ready to do it. As the season goes, hopefully I will be able to push a little harder on certain things, but I feel like last year showed me that I was ready to go.”
He also talked on March 6 about wanting to flatten his swing.
“I don’t know if flatten is the right word but I just want to get on plane or on the path of the pitch a lot more,” Volpe said to Jack Curry. “I think it gives a lot more margin for error. Nobody is perfect and I figure the more area of impact I have the more success I can have.”
Pitchers went up in the zone a lot with him and this is part of his adjustment from his rookie season.
“A lot of it is just me controlling what I feel like I can do,” Volpe said. “If I feel like I am putting myself in a position to cover just the pitches I should be able to cover then I think they have to make another adjustment. But when you are not earning your pitches then they can do whatever they want. I want to make sure I am covering what I need to cover.”
On January 26, Willie Randolph, who was the Yankees third base coach in Derek Jeter’s first nine seasons of his career and was a six-time All-Star in his 18 MLB seasons, had these words of praise to say about Volpe: “As a matter of fact, I think Anthony is more polished than Jeter was at the same time.”
Volpe and Jeter were both first round picks by the Yankees out of high school.
Volpe did have a few hot streaks at the plate and he will look to be more consistent this upcoming season. In his first 10 games last season, he went 4–31 (.129). In his next seven games, he went 7–20 (.300) with three runs scored, a double and a homer.
From April 24 through May 5, he went 12–40 (.300) with five runs scored, two doubles, one homers and five RBI. In seven games from June 18 through June 24, he went 3–18 but then in eight games from June 25 through July 3, he went 15–30 with eight runs scored, two doubles, a homer and two RBI. After that hot streak he had just two hits in his next nine games to lower his average from .225 to .208.
In September, Volpe had just one multi-hit game. He started the month of September going 3–25 in his first seven games of the month. He ended the season on a five-game hitting streak and was 5–18 in those five games.
Volpe has the potential to be an All-Star at shortstop if he can improve his average to at least .250, have a similar OBP that he had in the minors and have the same amount or even more homers and steals as he had in his rookie campaign.
