I Have So Many Thoughts on Anthony Volpe
- E.J. Fagan
- Oct 20
- 3 min read
By E.J. Fagan
October 2025
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NOTE: The following comes from EJ Fagan's substack page and is shared with permission.
Please check out EJ's substack page for more great articles.
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Anthony Volpe had surgery on his labrum. The recovery will be four months for most activity and six months to field. He’ll be out until at least early May.
I had planned to avoid blogging until after the World Series, but I have too many thoughts to hold in. Here we go.
The Yankees Grossly Mishandled Volpe in 2025
Volpe gets hurt on May 3rd. From then until the end of the season, he hit a rock bottom .205/.255/.377 while playing awful defense at short. On some level, I get playing him when the alternative was Oswald Peraza and the impact of the injury was uncertain. Peraza now has a career .542 OPS, and looked even worse in 2025.
But Jose Cabarello is definitely better than a .632 OPS with bad defense. His career OPS is .657 (.686 in 2025) with consistently great defensive metrics. And he’s one of the game’s best baserunners. But after they traded for him, Cabarello started just two (!) games at shortstop before Volpe’s cortisone shot week off starting September 10th. Volpe got one day off after returning, then Cabarello started just one further game at shortstop all season and postseason.
This isn’t hindsight. I could find plenty of contemporary accounts making this argument and presuming that Volpe was dealing with a major shoulder injury, including mine here.
Utterly insane. Even if you think a hurt Volpe is better than Cabarello, at least give the guy with a torn labrum some real rest.
The Yankees Have a Culture Problem
I’m going to wildly speculate for a little bit. Anthony gets seriously hurt in May. Somewhere along the line, he decides to suck it up and play through the injury. Aaron Boone answers questions about it for months and minimizes what everyone can see with their plain eyes. It takes until August for the Yankees to send him for an MRI or whatever, revealing a serious injury that is significantly impacting his play, and try to treat the injury. They lose a bunch of games that they didn’t need to in the meantime because one position is playing below replacement level.
That paragraph works whether the word after Anthony is “Volpe” or “Rizzo". It’s the exact same fact pattern. And I wonder what other players fit the pattern that we don’t know about. Stanton’s shoulder injury in 2018? DJ LeMahieu’s entire post-pandemic career?
Someone in that clubhouse is telling people to suck it up, don’t look for problems and play through it even if the team is better off without them. Ultimately, that falls on Aaron Boone.
This is Sort of Good News
I’ve seen fans go real hard on Volpe after this season. I think that’s wrong.
2024 Anthony Volpe was a perfectly fine major league starting shortstop.
I wish he could hit better, but gold glove shortstop defense is worth a lot. In Volpe’s case, that was enough to boost him to 3+ WAR despite a .657 OPS. It’s not his fault that the 2024 Yankees had five other #9 hitters. Guys like Ryan McMahon, Ke’Bryan Hayes, Ceddanne Rafaela and Marcus Semien are valuable MLB starters with similar profiles.
2025 was different. Now you’re talking about 1.0 WAR, which was 23rd worst among 145 qualified hitters.* If that’s what you would expect going forward, Volpe has to go. Maybe even non-tendered.
*Paul Goldschmidt, in less playing time was actually worse at 0.8 WAR
But the injury changes the calculation. You have a good hypothesis as to the cause of Volpe’s decline. If you want to be even more optimistic, you could point to his .748 OPS on the day of the injury. Given the weak shortstop market, I think it makes sense to roll back Cabarello and Volpe next year and spend your money elsewhere. Bo Bichette is not the answer if you care about defense.
And there’s still hope for Volpe’s career. Take a look at, for example, Dansby Swanson’s career. It started off arguably worse than Volpe’s, but just a little more hitting made his defense into a huge asset.
Just to expand the discussion beyond Volpe, if I may, the Yankees are already looking at some major problems as 2026 comes around. Schmidt coming off TJ surgery and probably won't be ready until after the all star break. Cole coming off TJ surgery and at age 35 will he be able to rely simply on fastballs; if not can he develop additional pitches? Rodon coming off elbow surgery. Don't know if he'll be ready at the start of the season. So, the starting rotation is: Fried, Gil, and Schlittler. See where I'm going with this? Now, let's pivot to position players. Volpe is out maybe till June and there is discussion that Caballero, a career bench guy is the…
even after his untimely death due to medical neglect,
them Yankee medical groupies
used Galvanic shock upon his corpse
and continued to send him into the field.
this is worser than when they amputated Judge's foot
without telling anyone
With Volpe's D having been atrocious, and his bat even worse, Peraza even with a .150 BA would've been a major upgrade on the glove alone.
But with all these bad injuries over the last few years, and how they were allowed to play with them, where is the MLBPA in all this? Shouldn't they be doing something to protect their members, even if they are New York Yankees players?