Official Yankee fan thread

[Kccitystar]

Just my hot take on Volpe: 

I know Volpe looks lost right now and fans are tired of waiting him to bounce back, but I don’t think the answer is “he has to go.” The bigger issue to me is how the Yankees develop players.

 

The Yankees don’t really treat Volpe like a player to develop. They've had a heavy track record of treating players like him like an input > output equation. Boone’s recent quote in the media about "productive players come in many forms" is just front office code for waiting on their analytical model to spit out a result. That’s been the Cashman-era philosophy the front office has: They'll build player profiles based on proprietary metrics: exit velocity, launch angle, zone contact %, chase rate, OAA, sprint speed, then the front office decides which profile has the best probability of long term success, and then the development staff spends time trying to "nudge" players until they resemble those profiles.
 

So instead of tailoring instruction to the things the player is good at naturally (like the Dodgers or the Astros), the org will emphasize adjustments that line up with their models. A hitter with pull power might be told to flatten their swing to boost contact and OBP, even if it undercuts how they do damage in the batters box, for example. The idea is that over enough reps, a player will statistically “normalize” to their true talent. So if the numbers don’t look right early, the front office will preach patience: trust the process, the algorithm will prove out. So this delays interventions or coaching to set an identity (like being a table setter instead of a power threat) for a player.

 

As a consequence according to Statcast/Savant, Volpe's in a hitter's no-mans-land: His swing is not long enough to punish deep contact, not fast enough to cover late decisions, and too max-effort to stay controlled. Rather than the Yankees coaching him to fully commit to one identity and molding Volpe into something, they would rather wait to see who Volpe becomes in the algorithm, some abstract statistical ideal. This ends up ultimately making a roster full of depth pieces but never fully developing players who would end up being stars.

 

It’s why the org keeps doubling down on him and giving him as much runway as possible, because he’s supposed to be the proof that the efficient, quant-driven system they instituted to develop players works. To demote him or bench him for another starter is an indictment of their development process, and admitting that passing up on opportunities for a SS in consecutive years in favor of the homegrown guy was a mistake. For a brand and optics-obsessed team like the Yankees, they can't have that.

 

Judge is the only outlier on the roster that became a superstar and that's solely because since 2017, he's worked outside the Yankee bubble with his own trainers and coaches. His development and growth has been in spite of the Yankees' rigid system, not because of it. If Volpe steps outside that bubble in the offseason (whether that's spending an offseason at Driveline, listening to new coaching voices, whatever it takes), he probably bounces back, but just like Judge, it’ll be in spite of the Yankees’ development process, not because of it.