Erik Boland: Yankees give Anthony Volpe a second chance, and he takes advantage with a grand slam
Yankees second baseman Anthony Volpe hits a grand slam against the Colorado Rockies during the seventh inning at Yankee Stadium on Thursday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The chants were loud.
And, a little more than a month ago, just about impossible to conceive of as being remotely possible.
“Vol-pe!” “Vol-pe!” “Vol-pe!”
Anthony Volpe, a player who, at the time of his banishment to the minors in early August had reached an Aaron Hicks level of unpopularity among Yankees fans, heard not just raucous cheers late Thursday night but demands for a curtain call.
Volpe, with a noticeable edge now born from what has been by far the most challenging season of his professional career, somewhat sheepishly acquiesced, emerging from the dugout to recognize the noisy throng.
“Probably a little bit of a blackout,” Volpe said with a smile of his emotions in the moment.
Manager Aaron Boone, steadfast in his support probably to a fault the last couple of years in the face of some of Volpe’s prolonged struggles, said of the curtain call: “That was cool.”
“He went down there [the minors] and worked his tail off,” Boone said later.
Much of that work took place at second base, where Volpe made his first career big-league start Thursday night.
Volpe, whose name was accompanied by cheers when it was announced during pregame introductions and again before his first at-bat, already had two hits on the night when he stepped to the plate with two outs in the seventh inning.
Facing Rockies righty Jimmy Herget, Volpe poked a 1-and-1 sinker just over the rightfield wall for his second career grand slam (the first came in Game 3 of the 2024 World Series against the Dodgers). It gave the Yankees an eight-run lead in a 10-3 victory that pulled them within three games of the AL East-leading Rays.
The blast elicited the curtain call request from the Stadium crowd of 40,706, as well as from his teammates. “Everyone was ushering me out there,” Volpe said, smiling again.
Volpe, a 2019 first-round pick who played almost exclusively at shortstop throughout his fast rise through the Yankees’ minor-league system, spent the better part of the last month after his demotion to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre playing second base, getting 19 games there (as well as some time at third and shortstop).
After Thursday’s game, Volpe acknowledged having a feeling of “I never thought I was going to be back here” this season.
His feeling was not without cause.
In addition to Volpe failing to launch this season — either offensively or defensively — heralded shortstop prospect George Lombard Jr. came up in early August to replace Volpe at short and immediately looked the part, both in the field and at the plate.
The flip of Lombard for Volpe was met with an approval rating of about 100% when it came to the Yankees’ fan base, which during the previous two seasons soured significantly on the latter.
But Volpe’s prospects for returning to the Bronx this season changed when Jazz Chisholm Jr. went to the injured list Thursday with a right thumb strain.
And while 19 games doesn’t seem like a lot in order to learn a new position, the Yankees were comfortable bringing Volpe up to fill Chisholm’s spot.
“I would imagine he’s going to be very good at it,” Boone said before the game. “The reports have been excellent. His skill set, his athleticism, the ground he’s able to cover should serve him well at that position.”
Volpe starting at second — coupled with Lombard at short — raised an intriguing, somewhat obvious question: Could that be the Yankees’ middle-infield combination in 2027 and beyond?
Volpe, after all, is only 25.
Lombard hit the Yankees’ first grand slam of the season on Wednesday. Volpe joined him on Thursday.
Despite his struggles to find consistent success at this level, a definitive biography on Volpe’s big-league career cannot yet be written.
And maybe the consistent-success portion of that career will come at the position — second base — at which many rival scouts during his climb through the Yankees’ system predicted he was best suited long-term in the majors.
“Always loved the kid,” said one National League scout who has covered the Yankees’ system for the last decade-plus. “The makeup, how he went about his work. All of it. But, for me, I always saw him at second.”
Volpe, who hit .333 with eight homers and a 1.218 OPS in his previous 17 games with Scranton, said before Thursday’s game that his adjustments at the plate in the minors were not so much physical. Rather, he said it was more a case of “mentally having the mindset I wanted to get a lot out of it,” the “it” being his time in Triple-A.
“You have a game every night to try out different stuff and feel what works and if it’s going to translate if an opportunity like this comes,” he said.
That opportunity presented itself in the form of an injury to Chisholm, a free agent after this season who almost certainly will not be back in the Bronx next season.
Leaving open the possibility of, well, perhaps a second Yankees act for Volpe.
Notes & quotes: Volpe and Spencer Jones each had three hits, Cody Bellinger had two doubles and Luis Garcia Jr. hit his 30th homer, a two-out, two-run shot . . . The Yankees, who trailed the Rays by 6 1⁄2 games entering Aug. 16, have gone 16-7 since then to move within three games. They are a season-high 22 games over .500 at 84-62.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
