Yankees just made move that could actually kill promising Anthony Volpe momentum

The New York Yankees are watching Anthony Volpe heat up down in Scranton, fueling hopes that he can come back up and salvage his future with the club as rosters expand. In the 23 games since he returned to Triple-A, he's batting .276 with a 1.008 OPS, eight homers and 16 RBI, showcasing a power stroke that was absent for the entirety of his 2026 campaign up to this point.

With George Lombard Jr. grabbing the reins at shortstop, it seemed that the plan was to send Volpe down to increase his versatility. Aaron Boone said that the Yankees would have him play both shortstop and second base in Scranton. That's a plan that we had heard before, but this time it has actually been executed and is perfectly reasonable.

Rumors surfaced during the fallen shortstop's last minor league stint that he refused to play second base, which were completely unfounded. You can criticize Volpe for a lot of things, but he's definitely a guy who gives it his all and is a team player. And that brings us to the latest experiment: in addition to second base, New York has Volpe taking reps at third base.

And to that we ask: why? The No. 1 concern with his capabilities at shortstop was his arm strength. Why do we think that'll play better further away from first base?

The Yankees have a need at third, but Anthony Volpe is not the solution

The impetus behind playing Volpe at the hot corner is simple. Ryan McMahon is no star, but he's stabilized his performance against right-handed pitching enough to the point where his glove work makes him an acceptable player on the strong side of a platoon. His .462 OPS against southpaws, however, makes him unplayable against lefties.

Amed Rosario hasn't gotten the job done as his platoon partner. A .610 OPS against lefties from him is unacceptable, and his porous defense makes his value proposition effectively zero.

With that said, Volpe isn't the answer. Volpe's strength on defense is his range, which is nullified by the quick-twitch nature of the hot corner. More importantly, he doesn't have the arm to play the position.

During his big league action this season, Volpe's 79 miles per hour average arm strength ranked in the 14th percentile. If we accept that there could be some small sample size noise there, a look back through the years confirms he doesn't have a great arm. His pea-shooter ranked in the 33rd percentile last season, the 29th percentile in 2024, and the 28th percentile in 2023.

Volpe's 13 throwing errors last year were the third-most among qualified shortstops, and it's a fair hypothesis to say that many of his non-throwing fielding gaffes were at least partially caused by a worry (consciously or not) about his ability to throw out a base runner.

Playing Volpe at second base makes a lot of sense. What he does well at short translates nicely to the keystone, and what he struggles with defensively is easily hidden. On top of that, a right-handed bat to protect Jazz Chisholm Jr. from tough lefties would be a nice bonus, and the Yankees will need a solution at the position if they let Chisholm Jr. walk in free agency.

However, third base is just putting him in a bad spot and, as we know, issues on one side of the ball tend to follow Volpe to the other side of the game. The Yankees are watching him ride a heater right now at the plate, and doing anything that could disrupt that at the big league level isn't going to help him get back to where he needs to be.

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow