Goofiest play you'll ever see perfectly sums up the Yankees' Anthony Volpe experience

It's Year 3 of Anthony Volpe, New York Yankees starting shortstop. We have enough experience under our belt to acknowledge a universal truth: ignore the metrics in April. Ignore anything that looks like a deviation from the baseline norm. They will always normalize. They will always regress. They will always end exactly where we are now: middling numbers below the hood, good-not-great statistics, enough WAR to satisfy a calculator, and a handful of baffling defensive moments that leave you gasping for air.

Without a change in leadership or development strategy, the Anthony Volpe we heard about in the minors doesn't appear to exist. That's been by far the most frustrating part of the experiment. The killer baseball instincts haven't manifested. The "gym rat" ethos for always making the winning play never showed up. Sure, sometimes the bat gets lost in translation somewhere along the way between High-A and the majors. Maybe the power gap widens. But shouldn't the nose for the ball be a constant? How do the outlines of a player's game turn from smooth to choppy? If Aaron Boone's greatest strength is being a caring, comforting dad, then why does Volpe always look so uncomfortable?

Instead of being a Ripken or a savant, Volpe is a completely solid player who doesn't deserve the constantly humming vitriol that he receives for being an acceptable starter on a championship team. That said, during Year 3, it's fair to feel frustrated that the leap we all sought now feels unattainable.

And then, every so often, as the fervor dies down, we're given a moment like this that swings the pendulum. It's unreasonable to scream every time Volpe swings through a fastball. It's perfectly fair to wonder how we ended up with a player who occasionally makes momentum-spewing moments out of nothing at all.

In the eighth inning Monday night ... this happened. What ... happened?

Yankees' Anthony Volpe showing defensive cracks more than ever in Year 3

That's Jose Trevino on the run, a grunt-fueled backup catcher we're all intimately familiar with. That isn't Billy Hamilton.

That's a big hop and one of the most elementary third-out gifts a shortstop can receive. Why is he backing up onto the outfield grass instead of charging? Why is he skittish when he should be at his most confident? No matter; he should record the out anyway with a reasonable throw.

And ... there's the unreasonable throw. And there's the man scoring from second easily on a routine grounder because of a max-effort, two-out sprint. And there's every Yankee fan thanking their lucky stars that this is a talking point in a 6-1 game instead of a decisive game-breaking run — which, based on recent weeks of the Anthony Volpe Experience, it very well could've been.

If Volpe's not going to be the star that was foretold, the Yankees at the very least need him to be a fundamentally sound cog in a championship-level machine. In Year 3, a supposedly crucial season for his development, he's tripped further and further away from that by the day.

Ignore Clint Frazier blathering about how Volpe's 0-for-4 is a rebuke of the Yankees' disbelief in "hot"; focus instead on the high-hopping grounder he let a catcher beat out to first with a series of mind-saltingly halting motions. This cannot continue. And yet it has. And yet it probably will.