For those who don’t live in the New York tri-state area or otherwise haven’t been paying attention to the Yankees, Anthony Volpe has emerged as the latest scapegoat for a fanbase that’s been nursing a steady burn over the team’s vanishing preeminence.
Once celebrated as the heir apparent to Derek Jeter, Volpe has struggled to remain consistently productive over his three big league seasons. This year, after seeing his average drop back into the low .200s, with his defensive prowess also suffering a slide, many fans are clamoring for the former top prospect to find a permanent seat on the bench.
Something similar seems to be brewing over in Cincinnati, where Matt McLain’s struggles have prompted calls for the promotion of the latest hot-hitting prospect and would-be savior, Sal Stewart.
What do Volpe and McLain have in common? Both are middle infielders who raised hopes with their power/speed profiles in the Minors and have shown flashes of those skills in the Show since debuting in 2023. And both are built like fairly typical middle infielders, which is to say they’re relatively small by MLB standards – a listed 5′ 9″, 180 pounds for McLain and a (bigger than I expected) 5′ 10″, 197 for Volpe.
I can’t speak too knowledgably of McLain’s situation, but for Volpe, at least, the widespread assertion is that he’s a man without a clear plan of attack at the plate. In 2023, when he swatted 21 home runs but hit just .209, he was trying to pull the ball over the fence too often. In 2024, when his average climbed to .243 but the home runs dropped to 12, he supposedly flattened his bat path too much to become more contact-oriented. This year, with the power back up but the average again pushing the Mendoza Line, he’s lapsed into the pull-happy habits of his rookie season.
That’s the accepted blogosphere analysis, at any rate, and I agree that Volpe needs to figure out what kind of hitter he wants to be. But even if he’s a little taller and heavier than he looks, I hope he elects for the less glamorous route of contact over power.
A half-century or so ago, before Cal Ripken Jr. emerged on the scene, it was rarer to see a middle infielder deliver middle-of-the-order thump. Sure, there were some notable names to succeed in that endeavor, from Rogers Hornsby to Vern Stephens and Ernie Banks, but those were the exceptions from the group of mostly slighter, glove-first athletes tasked with the demand of turning the double play.
But then the 6’4″ Iron Man came along, paving the way for Álex Rodríguez and other big-bodied boppers to step in at shortstop. Meanwhile, virtually everyone during the offensive boom of ’90s was swinging for the fences, raising the bar for what was expected to hold down a big league job. But the boom ebbed, the pitchers came roaring back and now we have a generation of position players who are still trying to blast the ball over everyone’s heads while lugging along averages in the .230 range.
And I get it – everyone wants to be a home run hero. As that famous Nike commercial put it, chicks dig the long ball. Decades before that, a quote oft attributed to Ralph Kiner (but first uttered by Fritz Ostermueller) summed up the financial lure of the power game: “Home-run hitters drive Cadillacs and singles hitters drive Fords.”
The thing is, not everyone is built – or wired – to hit home runs. Looking strictly at a few other current Yankees, the enormous Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton are obviously built for the purpose. Ben Rice, listed at 6′ 2″ and 228 pounds and sporting a 98th percentile average exit velocity, is also clearly a legitimate slugger.
It’s not entirely a matter of size. Volpe’s keystone partner, the lithe 5′ 11″, 184-pound Jazz Chisholm Jr., can launch a ball out of any park with that whiplash swing. José Ramírez, a compact but stocky 5′ 8″ and 190 pounds, has fashioned himself an annual 30-home run threat and twice landed on the doorstep of 40. And then there’s the pint-sized marvel Jose Altuve, who has surpassed 20 long balls seven times and 30 twice despite measuring just 5’6″ and 167 pounds.
Thinking of Altuve, I was reminded of a description of hitting by Stan Musial from one of my favorite childhood books, Voices from Cooperstown. Musial describes how he initially tried to punch the ball to left and left-center as a young big leaguer, but eventually developed the confidence to pull for power in the right situations. “The secret of hitting homers is just flipping the ball over to that general direction,” he explains, adding, “I guess it’s not as easy as it sounds, though.”
Maybe not. But the point is that if you take a guy who demonstrates the ability to make solid, consistent contact, he can learn to turn some of those gap doubles into home runs. I think that’s exactly what happened with Altuve, a player skilled enough to lead all of MLB with 225 hits and a .341 average in 2014, who then learned how to take advantage of the short-left field porch in Houston to add consistent power to his game.
It also happened with Jeter, to a degree. Jeter went from 10 home runs in his first two full seasons to 19 in his third and 24 in his fourth. But that mark stood as his career high, and Jeter never strayed too far from his strength, which was to dump the ball into right field. Can you imagine what would have happened if the 6′ 3″ Jeter came around 20 years later? He would have been programmed to drive the ball in the air, to stay back and power the top hand through the zone, as they teach kids nowadays. The Jeter as we know him, owner of 3,465 lifetime hits, probably wouldn’t have existed.
And maybe that’s the problem for Volpe and McLain as they try to forge their careers in the toughest baseball league in the world. Instead of being allowed to fall back on the basics of just putting the ball in play, they have to maintain the standard of power they learned at a young age that fueled their rise to this level. And when the slumps inevitably set in, it’s got to be awfully difficult to rediscover prime exit velocity form against an endless array of arms throwing 95-plus mph heat and wicked high-spin breaking balls.
For imposing, natural-born boppers like Judge, Stanton, Shohei Ohtani and Kyle Schwarber, the home runs come a little more easily. For Volpe, McLain, Jackson Holliday and other young players of more modest dimensions, it may be best to follow the course prescribed by the great Musial and master the all-fields approach before regularly aiming for the stands.
Maybe they won’t immediately draw the adulation of chicks, and maybe they’ll have to adjust the notion of the type of cars that fit into their budget. But they also might be setting themselves up for more sustainable careers and tangible appreciation from the fans, with the potential for greater material rewards further down the road.
Thanks to Baseball Reference and its extraordinary research database, Stathead, for help in assembling this piece.
Tim Ott
Tim's early yearnings for baseball immortality began on the dirt and grass of the P.S. 81 ballfield in the Bronx. Although a Hall of Fame career was not in the cards, his penchant for reading the MLB record book and volumes of history tomes led to an internship with MLB.com in 2002. Tim fulfilled an array of roles over the next nine years at the company, from editorial game producer to fantasy writer and editor and reporter for MLB-related promotions. While a busy freelance writing career has since taken him in other directions, Tim has always kept baseball in his heart, and is happy to be back to observing and reflecting on our great pastime.