Yankees get harsh Anthony Volpe reminder with Athletics' Jacob Wilson extension

Year 4 of Anthony Volpe should genuinely be the final chance he gets at everyday reps at the shortstop position for the New York Yankees. The team doesn't need to completely ditch him if he doesn't take a leap, but he can't be logging 150+ games moving forward.

Though most fans don't trust the Yankees to do that, the organization perhaps received another reminder they should on Friday. The Athletics signed star shortstop Jacob Wilson to a seven-year, $70 million extension, representing another young stalwart that has passed Volpe in the conversation.

And that's a long list. Volpe is 24 years old. That makes all of Wilson, Bobby Witt Jr., Elly De La Cruz, Zach Neto, Gunnar Henderson, Jeremy Peña, Masyn Winn, Ezequiel Tovar and CJ Abrams his "peers." All of those players are already eons better than Volpe on both sides of the ball, and it's not even a question.

It is what it is. The Yankees made the wrong bet. And it'll be all but confirmed if guys like Brooks Lee, Kevin McGonigle, Colson Montgomery, Konnor Griffin and others surpass him in the next year or two. That should unquestionably be the nail in the coffin.

Could Volpe re-write his story? Absolutely. He's still young, and he was off to a great start in 2025 before suffering the shoulder injury that ostensibly plagued him for the remainder of the season. But he will be making $4 million in 2026, which is a similar pay range for Abrams, Neto and Tovar. The Yankees, simply put, cannot afford to pay a significant pay hike in arbitration for Volpe if his production remains the same.

Yankees' Anthony Volpe far behind Athletics' Jacob Wilson

Though Wilson is far from a perennial All-Star or finished product, his 3.0 WAR rookie season featured an All-Star appearance and a second-place finish in the Rookie of the Year voting. He even received MVP votes for hitting .311 with an .800 OPS alongside solid defense (though it needs to improve, which should come with time).

On the other hand, Volpe has regressed after his rookie season on both sides of the ball. Even if we want to exclude his asterisk 2025 campaign that was hindered by an injury, Volpe's sophomore campaign in 2024 featured zero improvements with the exception of a marginal batting average boost.

We can't fully absolve anybody for what happened in 2025, either. Volpe was injured on May 3. We don't know who was responsible for the former top prospect getting zero rest or reprieve immediately after suffering the ailment, but that's an objective failure. And we can't help but assume a good portion of that falls on Volpe for repeatedly telling the team he was healthy enough to play when it feels like it was far from the case. It's admirable he wanted to fight through it, but the end result was a torn labrum, so there's just no way he played 5.5 months of baseball with zero pain and no adverse affect on his game.

But even if Volpe played 2025 fully healthy, it's hard to even envision him coming anywhere close to what Wilson did from a batting average and OPS standpoint. That would be an 89-point average increase and a 138-point OPS increase — also known as a completely different player.

All we're saying is that the Yankees are running out of leash to believe the jury's still out on Volpe. Unless we see a complete 180 in his player profile at the professional level, the likelihood is that the Yankees both mishandled and misjudged their former prized first-round pick. And as these other teams realize the talents they have, New York probably won't have plentiful opportunities to fill the future of the shorstop position with a star free agent.