Preface: I wrote this in the two weeks surrounding Opening Day last month, and have not updated it since. The Yankees are currently 15-11.
I.
“Happy Volpening Day!” My friend says as I greet him at the elevated 161st Street-Yankee Stadium stop of the 4-train. He’s talking to me, but the platform is mobbed, so a bunch of heads turn. “Happy Volpening Day!” an older guy in sunglasses responds with a grin. You can always tell the vibe of a Yankees crowd on the way down the subway stairs. When I was here for Game 3 of the ALCS last October, the crowd was grim and determined, loudly chanting “LETS GO YANKEES!” as we steeled ourselves for the monumental task of willing our team back from a 2-0 series deficit. When I returned 24 hours later for Game 4, the subway platform’s will had broken. A rainstorm had delayed the game’s start by an hour, and the straggling few that had not been battered into submission by the previous day’s atrocity were soggy, drunk, and distracted. “Why did we even come?” a guy my age asked his buddies as they passed around Poland Spring bottles with brightly colored liquid, and no one on the platform had a compelling answer.
Today, six months later, the crowd is practically giddy with relief. Relief that we finally have new games to wash out the taste of last season’s miserable conclusion, relief that compared to the brutal stress of the playoffs, the stakes of this game are pleasantly low, relief that the long winter is over and that we can see our pinstriped friends again, overwhelming relief that Aaron Judge is still one of them, and has finally signed a contract promising to stay for the next nine years, after a terrifying six-week flirtation with other suitors. And most of all, relief that after years of breathless hype from the prospect prophets of the Yankeeverse (and the hard-earned knowledge that so much can go wrong during a prospect’s gestation period), today we will lay eyes on our shortstop of the future, 21-year old Anthony Volpe.
Before spring training, MLB Pipeline ranked Volpe as the fifth-most promising prospect in the league, but cautioned that due to his age and lack of experience at the highest levels of the minor leagues, the Yankees would not call him up until the end of the summer at the earliest. Then, he played out of his mind in spring training and was named the opening day starting shortstop. This isn’t supposed to happen; no one is supposed to care about spring training performance, and also, under the current collective bargaining agreement, a team has overwhelming incentive to wait until May to promote a prospect so that his “service time clock” can start later. This extends that player’s window of “team control,” the six years in which a team enjoys the benefits of a league-imposed price ceiling, like a finance bro sneaking onto the lease of his uncle’s rent-controlled Brooklyn duplex. Eschewing the customary service time manipulation and debuting him on opening day is an expression of love that was previously thought to be outside the emotional range of the Yankees front office. “You’re not like other prospects,” the team is telling Volpe, publicly, for all friends and family to witness. “You’re special.”
Though they’d never admit it, the Yankees have been moved to such dramatic exhortations not only by Volpe’s talent but also his pedigree. He’s a local kid, born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, before moving to northern New Jersey, perhaps even more of an epicenter of Yankee fandom, in fourth grade. His parents are obsessional Yankee fans (his dad was apparently once a regular caller into WFAN sports talk radio, an impressive credential of depravity) who regularly took him to the Stadium. In 2019, he was named the New Jersey High School Player of the Year, and committed to play at Vanderbilt University, a perennial college baseball powerhouse, before the Yankees selected him as their first round draft pick, 30th overall, and lured him away from higher education with a $2.7 million signing bonus. This spring we’ve been treated to stories of his dad making him field a hundred grounders in the backyard every day, heard about how his parents are both surgeons (“that’s why he’s so good with his hands!”),1 and seen pictures of Volpe wearing a Yankee hat at every stage of his childhood. In his media availability, we’ve gotten a sense of Volpe’s dazed, incredulous gratitude, not just for being on the verge of realizing his outrageously improbable childhood dream of a professional baseball career, but for getting to start it on this particular team, out of the thirty that would have happily enjoyed his services. When the game starts, and it’s time to acknowledge the fans in the right field bleachers chanting his name, Volpe turns, raises his glove hand, then grabs the Yankee logo on his jersey with his other, brings it to his mouth and kisses it.
The crowd goes berserk, of course, but there’s a lingering air of anxiety, as fans realize the damage that might be in store for this sweet, brave boy, and the enormity of the task that awaits him, which, as a lifelong fan himself, Volpe must be all-too-aware of. You see, as he beats his glove and steps into a defensive crouch at shortstop, Volpe must know that he isn’t just there to play baseball for the Yankees, with all the stress and scrutiny that entails. He’s also there to vanquish a ghost.
II.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. This insight seems woefully misplaced for the current era of Major League Baseball. Teams shed their past each year, constantly cycling through players, coaches, and even front office staff. “You’re actually rooting for clothes,” Jerry Seinfeld argued persuasively. “If the same guy wears a different shirt, all of a sudden everyone boos him.” The Yankees sign more players to long-term contracts than most teams, but even still, of the 50 teammates that played with Aaron Judge during his 2017 rookie season, only three remain on this year’s roster. Only two of them ever shared the field with A-Rod; neither came close to Jeter. The past would seem to have few tangible mechanisms to make its presence felt. But trust me, or Faulkner, the past finds a way.
Here’s another version of the same idea, from Carl Jung: “Until we make the unconscious conscious, we will be dictated by it and call it fate.” But this is silly, professional sports teams cannot have consciousness and unconsciousness, right? Right?
Of course they can. All sports teams are haunted by ghosts. Like anyone else, a sports team experiences childhood traumas that unknowingly define the way that they engage with the world, establish new relationships, perform empathy and love, and win championships. Some teams had stable childhoods and have relatively tame ghosts that allow them to lead simple, pleasant, well-adjusted lives. But talk to any Mets, Jets, Nets, or Knicks fan for more than thirty seconds, and you’ll see it in their eyes. Hell, you can even hear it in the panicked voices of their haunted players, like Jets QB Sam Darnold, who was caught on a hot mic telling his offensive coordinator that he was “seeing ghosts out there” during a particularly savage prime-time loss to the Patriots. Make no mistake, players may come and go. The ghosts, and the glorious, idiosyncratic agony they dole out, are what gives the team an ineffable sense of continuity from one year to the next, and the team’s futile attempts to overcome the ghosts are what we truly cheer on when we cheer for laundry.
It’s not quite right to say that a ghost is what makes your team bad. A winning team can still suffer through curses, just as people can get a promotion or a new romantic partner and not instantaneously shed their neuroses. It’s closer to say that a ghost is what makes your team weird. Your manager’s intermittent spells of outrageously bad judgment, your star pitcher’s bout with a disease that is only supposed to infect toddlers, your formerly charismatic second baseman’s unconcealed rage at his fans. When a double in the gap manages to dribble through the outfield wall of Citi Field, when iconic Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty forgets how to skate and wipes out on the ice in slow motion, or when your sweaty owner decides to sign an aging B-list All Star to an unprecedented mega-deal because he wants a new friend and hasn’t felt anything at all in months, when anything truly irrational or mystical derails your season, it is the work of the ghosts.
Teams cannot escape their shadowed qualities unless they acknowledge them, and very few are interested in doing that work. To be clear, I have it better than most. As a Yankee fan, it’s important to acknowledge the privileges that I’ve grown up with, ones that less fortunate fans would probably kill for. But privileged people still have to work through their issues, and privileged teams still have ghosts. The Yankees have a few, and for the better part of the Judge years, they’ve been haunted most by the Specter of Short Stop, or Spooky Six, a vicious wraith who haunts the echoey vacuum in the seat of the Jeterian throne.
III.
This Specter is the metaphysical manifestation of the team’s unresolved feelings towards Derek Jeter, the outrageous success his teams enjoyed in the beginning of his career, and their subsequent failure to maintain that level of success. Lurking beneath its billowy ectoplasm, the Specter contains the Yankee fanbase’s deepest and most foolhardy belief, one that all fan bases have to some extent, but which is cultivated and nurtured to absurd proportions in the Bronx, which is that their team is special. For two decades, The Captain was supposed to be a talismanic figure of Yankee exceptionalism, the next in a long, hallowed line of talismanic Yankees, like Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle, whose greatness had spawned the franchise’s dynastic, unparalleled success. The Yankees had won four championships in five years (for the fourth time in franchise history, ludicrously) between 1996 and 2000, and it must have been because of the greatness of their young, homegrown, hustling, (sort of) humble, clutch shortstop. The Yankees were special because Jeter was special, because he played the game the right way, the Yankee Way.
In doing so, he served as a soothing balm to anxious fans, who had begun to wonder whether the team might be special for other, uglier reasons, whether there might be a relationship between their dominance and their owner’s unparalleled willingness to spend the GDP of a midsized former Soviet republic to pay the roster. Jeter was equally comforting to the rest of the league, led by “small-market” owners (in the age of ten-figure television deals and league-wide revenue sharing, a small-market Major League Baseball owner, like a blue-collar billionaire, is an oxymoron), who worried that if Mr. Steinbrenner could buy success so easily that they might soon be forced to do so as well.
At the turn of the century, these anxieties had been brought into hyperfocus by another young shortstop prodigy, Alex Rodriguez, with whom Jeter’s career and spiritual legacy would soon be inextricably intertwined. When A-Rod signed a ten-year, $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers, the most lucrative contract in professional sports history at the time, it posed an existential threat to the fabric of baseball. Players weren’t supposed to be paid that much, and yet for someone of A-Rod’s caliber, it was actually too little. “The most incredible thing about this is that he was more than earning every penny…According to Fangraphs’ numbers, he was worth $106 million in his three years in Arlington, during which he was paid $66 million.” pointed out Tim Marchman in 2016, in his excellent career retrospective of A-Rod.
The Yankees eventually took A-Rod, a four-time All-Star, the reigning American League MVP, on a historically undervalued contract, in 2004. They did so passively, reluctantly, at the last second, more as a favor to financially ailing Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks than anything else. But the Yankees organization, their fans, and the New York media all reached an immediate consensus that A-Rod was not part of Yankees exceptionalism. Jeter, an obviously, demonstrably worse player in every respect, would still be prioritized as the face of the franchise, the Captain who embodied the Yankee Way, while A-Rod would be treated as an awkward interloping appendage, always desperately trying to fit in and repeatedly being told that he would never do so. Jeter, a below-average fielder even in his pirouetting prime, would remain at shortstop, the most important defensive position in the infield, while A-Rod, widely considered one of the greatest fielding shortstops of all-time (and the greatest hitting shortstop, by a mile, there’s no one else particularly close), would be shunted over to third base, where he would be physically and spiritually peripheral to the action.
When, during spring training, Jeter found out that A-Rod had once said something banal and critical about him in an interview five years earlier, he invited the whole team except A-Rod to his Tampa mansion for an ice cream party. When the tabloids got word of this, somehow it was another example of A-Rod being a bad fit in the clubhouse, rather than of Jeter being a petty asshole. Soon after, A-Rod divorced his wife and began dating celebrities like Madonna and Kate Hudson. The tabloids called him a pervert, a distraction, a self-destructive womanizing lothario. Around the same time, Jeter dated Mariah Carey, Minka Kelly, and Jessica Alba. The tabloids thought that was awesome. Over the next six seasons, A-Rod would win two more MVP awards, hit hundreds of home runs, play in every All Star Game, and perpetually disappoint the Yankees fans who insisted that he wasn’t worth his contract. Jeter would finish third in MVP voting once, never higher, accumulate half as many WAR as A-Rod, would see his power-hitting abilities, never his strength to begin with, diminish incrementally each year, and would continue to field routine ground balls with as much display of histrionic effort as possible, even if that meant converting them into outs at lower rates than his peers.
Of course, the steroids accusations derailed and disgraced the end of A-Rod’s career (it’s worth noting that Jeter, like David Ortiz, and many other beloved legends, had a positive PED test, and everyone decided not to care). But still, when it was time for the two greats to retire, A-Rod was kicked out of the 2016 Yankees in the middle of the year, during a slump, without any fanfare. Jeter, meanwhile, was given a full year farewell tour, and was allowed to play every single game, even though his abilities had worn down so much that he was for parts of that season literally the worst player in the league. In his last at bat, in a meaningless finale of a pathetic losing season, his teammates blatantly let the Orioles tie the score so that they could, equally blatantly, put a runner in scoring position and then groove him a batting practice changeup for Jeter to hit for a walk-off single. Through it all, fans poured into the stadium in his jersey, chanted his name, showered him with adoration in every medium available to them. He was Mr. Yankee, the Captain, the guy who could Play In New York, who Played the Game the Right Way.
The central paradox of Yankee fandom that has allowed the Specter of Short Stop to flourish is the depressing reality that even Jeter was not Jeter, that the legend was always larger than the real life player, and that if Jeter himself couldn’t be the talismanic hero that the Yankees needed to lead them to a new age of dynastic dominance (the Yankees won a championship in 2009 but had early playoff exits every other year despite massive payroll spending), then how could anyone else possibly fill those shoes? This anxiety, in its ghostly form, has tortured the team, brutalized some of the team’s best players, and repeatedly foiled their championship ambitions. On Thursday, March 30th, the Specter meets a new adversary, as Anthony Volpe takes the field. He’s our last, best hope of vanquishing this ghost, freeing us from the tyranny of the past, and ushering in the dawn of a new dynasty.
Next Week in the Great Volpening: The 2023 Yankees Have Five Shortstops and It’s Really Awkward, plus Spooky Six’s Slumber during the Peaceful Reign of Sir Didi Gregorius.
His mom is actually an anesthesiologist, which technically means she’s not a surgeon, but these are the kinds of nuances that get lost on the frenzied threads of r/nyyankees.