Why a light-hitting shortstop is a World Series X-factor

In a World Series where all the focus will be on the top sluggers who populate the lineups of both teams, it’s easy to forget that there are other players who are going to make a difference, too. Maybe that’s 20/20 Yankee third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr., or 2016 World Series hero Anthony Rizzo, or the somehow-overshadowed 33-homer man Teoscar Hernández, or postseason god Kiké Hernández. Sometimes, it’s not the brand-name superstars who decide who goes home with a ring. Sometimes, it’s Steve Pearce, or Jeremy Pe?a or David Freese.

So, when thinking about who that might be, naturally we’re thinking about the weakest regular hitter in all of Major League Baseball in September: Yankee shortstop Anthony Volpe.

Volpe, still just 23 years old, has lived a few different careers in his two years in the Bronx. Last year, as a rookie, there was plenty of good (a 20/20 season, a Gold Glove at shortstop), but plenty of problems too (a poor .283 OBP leading to a below-average 81 OPS+, and 167 strikeouts). A winter of well-discussed swing changes meant to flatten his swing and improve contact led to a red-hot start (.382 average and 1.041 OPS in his first 15 games) before the good luck disappeared, and he lost his job as leadoff man in early July.

It would get worse. In September, he completely bottomed out and hit a mere .177/.220/.212. It was the third-weakest hitting month by a Yankee with as many plate appearances as he got in the last three decades.

The swing changes that he implemented did indeed cut down his strikeout rate, from 28% to 23%. But his hard-hit rate dropped, too, from 43% to 35%. No hitter dropped his pull rate by as much as Volpe did; only three hitters increased their ground-ball rate by as much. What happened, really, was that the increased contact just turned strikeouts into weak outs, at the cost of power. Despite all the changes, his below-average 2023 OPS of .666 became a below-average 2024 OPS of … .657.

So why are we highlighting him as a potentially important X-factor here? It’s a little about his .310/.459/.345 postseason line, but anyone can get hot or lucky over nine games. Instead, it’s more about what’s happening under the hood. It’s more about … this.

And this …

… and, also this.

Volpe had 13 walks in the entire second half. He has eight in just nine postseason games. After being ahead in the count only 27% of the time in the regular season, he’s now in a good hitter’s count 44% of the time in the postseason. Some of this, then, is simple: he’s putting himself in better positions to succeed.

That’s a lot of graphics with a lot of numbers, so let’s sum it up for you like this: Volpe is swinging much harder, and as you’d expect his hard-hit rate has skyrocketed, yet he’s also doing it with much, much improved plate discipline. That’s not all unrelated, actually; Volpe, like most batters, swings harder at pitches in the zone (69.8 mph) than he does at pitches outside the zone (67.6 mph). So there’s at least a little chicken-or-the-egg here, except that he’s also swinging harder at pitches in the zone in October, so it’s at least a little about intent, too.

“I want to hit the ball hard. I want to barrel the ball up,” Volpe told MLB.com before the ALCS. “So when that's happening, I feel like I'm in a good spot.”

In case you’re wondering if it matters when Volpe swings hard, the answer is: Yes, very much so. The line for a fast swing is 75 mph, but since Volpe has below-average bat speed to begin with, let’s set the line for him at 73 mph, a mark he got to 13% of the time and is reaching 45% of the time in October.

Bat speed, 2024 for Volpe (postseason included)

• 73 mph and up // .303 AVG, .434 SLG // 25% whiff, 54% hard-hit
• Under 73 mph // .233 AVG, .342 SLG // 23% whiff, 31% hard-hit

Even for someone who doesn’t exactly have the stature of his massive teammates, swinging harder can lead to enormous gains, even if it adds a little more swing-and-miss – as Jeff McNeil and Gavin Lux showed us this season.

If it seems like this really just happened out of nowhere, that a light switch went on as soon as the postseason began, the data backs that up. In addition to his inability to perform in September, even just the final 10 days of the season – from Sept. 20 on – were more of the same, with a .192 average and a 70.2 mph swing. There was little reason to think anything would change. It had been months of this.

And then …

“The five days off were big, I think for a lot of guys,” said Volpe, before the Yankees faced the Guardians in the ALCS. “You just got to get in the cage. We're obviously here, and we have the Trajekt machine, so we've been getting eyes on all the pitchers, stuff like that.”

So much for the popular – and largely unsupported by data – myth that having a bye can only hurt batters, right?

“I watch him every day from the side, and it was noticeable to me in the week off or the days off leading up to the Kansas City series,” manager Aaron Boone said earlier this week. “It was like, ‘There you go. There it is.’ I think he's mechanically getting into a better position to get a good swing off. For me, he's just behind the ball. His load’s better.”

It would sure seem so, although when MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch asked Volpe about the increased bat speed following the deciding game of the ALCS, he insisted that “nothing had changed,” and that he was “swinging with everything he’s got, but I don’t know if it’s harder.”

Either way: These are all really, really good signs. So: Why haven’t they led to more power? The .310 average is nice, yet there’s just one extra-base hit this month (a double), and while not everyone needs to smoke balls into the seats like Judge or Stanton, the overreliance on batted balls missing gloves is part of what helped Volpe’s early hot start dissipate.

The Yankees might point to bad luck, as Alex Verdugo claimed, though Volpe’s .417 average on hard-hit balls in the postseason isn’t that far below the Major League average of .463, and he has one of the highest BABIP marks of any postseason player who made it to the final four. It’s not really that.

Instead, it’s about the one part of his game that hasn’t quite changed yet. This postseason, Volpe has hit a fly ball or line drive 15 times, i.e., “the kind of ball that might turn into extra base hits.” Only two of them were to the pull side, and one of those was the double, his lone extra base hit of the offseason. He’s 4-for-13 on his flies and liners to center and right, all singles. Another way of saying that is that 13% of his flies and liners have been pulled this month, the second-lowest of his career, and there were months last year when he was closer to 40%, like August 2023, when he hit .256/.333/.556 (.889 OPS).

It’s not, obviously, that any batted ball that isn’t pulled is useless. But for hitters with below-average bat speed and raw power like Volpe – and, believe it or not, Mookie Betts and Nolan Arenado – the pull side is really the only place you’re going to find power. If the changes Volpe has made this month stick, if the bat speed gains remain, if he can pull it just a little more, then a week from now, we might not just be talking about Stanton, Judge and Soto. We might be in awe of the light-hitting shortstop who seems to have found a completely new gear this month.