I’ve been thinking a lot about Anthony Volpe, and I think that’s the problem. We’ve all been thinking a lot about Anthony Volpe, giving him much more mental real estate than an average shortstop needs.
For me, and probably a lot of us, it started long before he got the Bronx. Yankee fans were obviously aware of him, for the same reason older readers were aware of Ruben Rivera and Brien Taylor a generation ago, the same reason we wonder when we’ll see the real Jasson Domínguez, the same reason we can’t wait for Carlos Lagrange and George Lombard, Jr.
It’s the Mythology, and no organization is better at writing mythology than your New York Yankees. Ruben Rivera was the compared to Mickey Mantle, Jasson Domínguez’s talents were so otherworldly that he became the Martian, and Carlos Lagrange is essentially unhittable. We buy into that mythology for the same reasons people have latched on to good stories for all of eternity. The human brain is wired for story, an evolutionary device that likely showed up around early campfires as our ancestors compared notes about the best ways to hunt dangerous prey. It lingers today as we trade memories while laughing through tears at a wake or open a dinner conversation with, “This you are not gonna believe…”
So as much as the analysts want to dig into WAR and OPS+, our lizard brains still crave the narrative, and so it has been with Anthony Volpe. He was thankfully never burdened with superstar comparisons, and even when people hoped he’d be the next Derek Jeter, they weren’t expecting that he’d retire with more hits than anyone but five people in baseball history, they just thought he’d have a twenty-year career playing shortstop in the Bronx. It wasn’t too much to ask.
The story around Volpe wasn’t about baseball legends. We didn’t see Mantle or DiMaggio when we looked at him, we saw ourselves. This is a kid who was born in Manhattan and grew up as a Yankee fan on the Upper East Side. When he got his first invite to the Yankees’ major league spring training camp — and this is the part of the story that always gets me — his father thought he was too busy to fly down for his first exhibition game. His mother knew better, so she made him go down with Anthony’s grandfather. Father and grandfather were sitting in the stands when the PA announcer said for the first time, “Now batting for the New York Yankees, Anthony Volpe.” The two grown men turned to each other and wept.
A few years later Volpe came to bat with the bases loaded in the third inning of Game 4 of the 2024 World Series with the Yankees trailing 2-1 in the game and 3-0 in the series. His game-turning grand slam did more than just push his team to a win, it cemented his place in our psyche. In that moment, he was us and we were him. When he took his position in the top of the fourth, the Stadium crowd greeted him by singing his name, and the die was cast.
We didn’t want Volpe to be Derek Jeter, we wanted him to fulfill our childhood dreams which hadn’t come true, the ones where we looked up into the stands in March to see our father or the ones where we hit a game-winning grand slam in October. And because he has shown himself to be just an adequate fielder with a .224 career batting average, we don’t just question him for failing and Aaron Boone for playing him and Brian Cashman for supporting him, we question ourselves.
