Preface: I wrote this in the two weeks surrounding Opening Day last month, and have not updated it since. This is the last of four installments, so if this is your first time here, it might help to start with Part I, Part II, and Part III. The Yankees are currently 26-20.
VIII.
Fittingly, the 2021-22 offseason was a historically good time to look for a franchise cornerstone superstar shortstop. Corey Seager, Carlos Correa, Trevor Story, Marcus Semien, four of the very best shortstops in the league, all in the beginning of their athletic primes, entered free agency (to give you a sense of how insanely talented this group was, Semien finished top-five in MVP voting in 2021, and still ended up with less money per year than both Correa and Seager.) All four seemed like perfect matches for the Yankees, with their stacked, championship-caliber roster, a gaping hole at the shortstop position (again), and pockets deeper than the Mariana Trench. But in a bout of un-Yankeelike restraint, Cashman resisted their siren song. Money needed to be saved for Judge, we were told, and with Volpe (and Peraza and Cabrera) lurking on the horizon, it would be silly to commit resources to the shortstop position long-term. Couched in the language of dispassionate economic analysis, Cashman was repackaging the same old folk wisdom, which was that the New York Yankees shortstop position simply isn’t suitable for a mercenary superstar. For the hallowed Jeterian throne, only a homegrown superstar would do.
The homegrown superstars were still gestating in the minors in April 2022, however, so Cashman instead turned to a third modern Yankee archetype: the bargain bin bonanza. The idea is to find a replacement-level nobody languishing on another team’s triple-A squad, acquire him for nothing, then give him one exquisitely simple piece of coaching wisdom (if he’s a hitter, maybe they’ll tell him to stop swinging at curveballs, if he’s a pitcher, they’ll look at his pitch arsenal and, if podcaster Jake Storiale is to be believed, instruct him to “just throw that one good pitch,” usually a sinker). The improbable, repeated success of the bargain bin bonanza gambit has been one of the Judge era’s great joys. In 2022 alone, it produced All-Stars Jose Trevino, Nestor Cortes, and Clay Holmes (all plucked from the dumpsters of other teams within a year of the 2022 All Star Game). The Yankees interim shortstop, Gio Urshela, had been a hugely successful bargain bin bonanza, but his bat had grown cold in 2021, and he was supposed to be a third baseman. It seemed fitting now to parlay him into another unproven infielder, preferably one who could actually play short, so that the Yankees could enjoy another inevitable, inexplicable ascent. On March 13th, the Yankees sent Urshela, along with egregiously haunted, once-glorious catching phenom Gary Sanchez, to the Minnesota Twins, receiving in return irritable, overpaid, declining but still fearsome (we hoped) former-MVP third baseman Josh Donaldson, and 27-year old infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who’d spent the previous year struggling to make the starting lineup of the abysmal Texas Rangers. The Yankees clearly believed that Kiner-Falefa, the revamped roster’s only shortstop besides Gleyber (and therefore its only shortstop), would turn into a bargain bin bonanza like all the others.
But creating a star from nothing is a delicate alchemy, and in retrospect it should have been clear that Cashman had botched the recipe. Bargain bin bonanzas are supposed to emerge from the bargain bin, not from a blockbuster trade involving two beloved, if fading, Yankee mainstays. And, crucially, once they join the roster, BBBs are meant to begin in the most peripheral roles: Trevino was supposed to be our backup catcher, Cortes our long-man or fifth starter at best, Holmes a low-leverage bullpen arm. By giving up significant assets for IKF, and then naming him starting shortstop, Cashman had burdened him with the ultimate toxifier of the BBB process: expectation.
The Yankees must have known this, they must have realized that you can’t manufacture unexpected success when you so clearly expect it. But what could they do? “We believe that Kiner-Falefa, our team’s only shortstop that we have taken great pains to acquire, will continue to be a sub-replacement-level hitter with no power whatsoever and an infuriating refusal to draw a walk.” They could have said. “We think he will play shortstop for us the way he has in the past: enthusiastically, but with sloppy technique and a few glaring weaknesses, such as an inaccurate throwing arm and an inability to charge in and field a weak grounder cleanly. He’s gonna be the everyday shortstop for the Yankees, a team with a whole psychological complex around shortstops, but to be clear, we project him to be terrible, and if he turns out to be good instead, that would be a hilarious and delightful stroke of good fortune.”
They did not say this. Instead we spent the spring of 2022 getting inundated with anecdotes of IKF’s work ethic, his instinctive leadership, his gritty competitiveness that would surely make him an excellent addition to the clubhouse. IKF had completely reworked his swing this off-season, we were told breathlessly, and his newfound bat-to-ball abilities would perfectly round out the Yankee’s homer-mashing, strikeout-prone lineup. IKF was really fast, and while this hadn’t yet translated into success stealing bases, surely it would this year. And above all, we were told that if we’d learned anything from the past few years, it was that shortstop was a defensive position first and foremost, and IKF was an elite defender with a Gold Glove award on his mantle.
“For THIRD!!!!!!” Some prescient fans (like Storiale and his podcasting counterpart Jimmy O’Brien) screamed back. “He won the Gold Glove as a third baseman, not a shortstop! At short he’s never been more than okay.” “Lalala can’t hear you, did we mention that he LOVES TO WIN?” the Yankees replied.
Spooky Six must have watched the Yankees saddle IKF with such outsized expectations like a gourmand peering into a restaurant’s kitchen to watch a Michelin-star chef grill his filet mignon. Or maybe not. Maybe Spooky had grown accustomed to the thrill of the hunt, relished his conquest of Gleyber, a speedy, elusive gazelle, and was deflated when he saw that the Yankees had instead sent a wounded zebra limping into his domain. Either way, he made quick work of Kiner-Falefa, whose touted new swing yielded the same brand of anemic hitting production, and whose allegedly elite defensive capabilities somehow had him leading the league in errors by midseason. But, in a twist of morbid creativity, Spooky allowed Kiner-Falefa to flash competence, or even brilliance, just enough to let the Yankees grit their teeth and pretend that everything was fine. A brief hot streak at the end of April brought his average above .300, which helped mask how cold he was immediately before and after. Despite leading the league in errors and grading out abysmally in one advanced defensive metric, Outs Above Average, peculiarly, he was actually a top-five defensive shortstop according to the other advanced defensive metric, Defensive Runs Saved. (Excellent players like Trea Turner regularly sneer at DRS, and in 2022, the Yankees coincidentally decided that it was the only metric worth referencing.) And having enjoyed the sadistic success of the 2019 juiced balls episode, Spooky decided to engineer another exogenous, league-wide phenomenon that happened to have a disparate impact on the Yankees and their shortstops: The league’s scorekeepers decided en masse to score fewer errors.
An error, of course, is a subjective statistic, meant to enforce a normative standard of what kind of plays a fielder “should” make. For some reason (ghosts, the reason was obviously ghosts), in 2022 scorekeepers decided to almost always credit the hitter with a hit, blame the pitcher, and spare the fielder with the indignity of an error. No one collected data on this, but in a video compilation posted on Twitter, podcaster Jimmy O’Brien made a compelling case that in addition to errors, IKF also probably led the league in EBPARPCEINITS, or Egregiously Bad Plays that Any Reasonable Person would Consider an Error If Not for the Inexplicable Timidity of the Scorekeeper (my term, not Jimmy’s). Yankees pitchers would repeatedly get imposing opposing hitters to hit feeble dribblers to the left side of the infield, IKF would charge in, stab his glove hand awkwardly at the ball and either botch the scoop, fail to transfer the ball to his throwing hand, or transfer but then throw it completely off the mark, and the scorekeepers would rule an infield single. Rulings like these allowed Boone to get up in front of everyone and say with a straight face that the “we like what Izzy brings us on defense.” IKF remained the everyday shortstop until the very end, when Boone, on the brink of elimination from the playoffs by the vastly inferior Cleveland Guardians, finally pulled the plug and brought in rookie Oswald Peraza instead. That it took Boone so long speaks to the extent of the Specter’s unparalleled ability to sow cognitive dissonance, blindness, and outright insanity. At the end of this season, there was a part of me that hoped the Yankees would forgo the shortstop position altogether, and place an extra player in the outfield instead. Abandoning the Jeterian throne and letting the Specter have unobstructed dominion over the expanse between second and third seemed like the only reasonable path. Defeating him was surely doomed.
IX.
Volpe finds himself in this expanse as he takes the field on opening day, waiting for a hard-hit ground ball that will let him flash his ghostbusting abilities. But then, a funny thing happens. Gerrit Cole, the team’s ace and one of the best pitchers in the league, starts pitching so well that the Giants can barely put the ball in play. After a leadoff walk, he strikes out the next four batters, gives up a single to center, and then strikes out three more in a row, on his way to a gaudy eleven strikeouts in six innings of shutout ball. Meanwhile, in the bottom of the first, Aaron Judge hits a towering solo shot to dead center. It’s as if the team’s two biggest stars, fed up with the Specter’s disruptions, have figured out that if Judge hits a home run once or twice a game and Cole strikes out every batter he faces, the team can win with literally no contributions from any other teammates.
Nevertheless, when it’s Volpe’s turn to bat in the bottom of the third, the whole stadium rises to its feet. He fouls off the first pitch, then watches two balls inside. With each one, the crowd becomes more delirious. “He’s supposed to be great at managing the zone,” I tell my friend, parroting something I heard from Storiale and O’Brien earlier that morning. He takes another pitch, a called strike on the inside corner, and for a moment it seems like I’ve jinxed him. But the next two miss the plate, Volpe sprints to first, and our section celebrates like he just hit a grand slam. DJ Lemahieu takes the plate, but the game’s center of gravity has moved 90 feet away, where Volpe is now leading off first base. He stole fifteen bases in eighteen games in spring training; base stealing and walking are supposed to be the two areas where Volpe will already be better than most major leaguers. These are not the most glamorous or valuable superpowers, compared with the ability to crush 400-foot dongs or throw unhittable 100 mph sinkers, but we’ll take them. Logan Webb, the pitcher, is visibly distressed by Volpe’s presence at first, and keeps stepping off the rubber to throw over, drawing our gleeful ire each time. He gets two strikes on DJ, and then on the fourth pitch of the at bat, Volpe takes off. He times his jump perfectly, and after a few lightning-quick sprint strides, he dives into second base headfirst, beating the catcher’s throw by a mile.
No one seems to notice, or care, that DJ strikes out on this pitch. Nor does anyone seem upset when Volpe grounds out in the fifth, or strikes out swinging in the seventh. Because for a brief moment, in the cloud of dust that his slide into second kicked up, we got to see our future at the shortstop position, and for the first time in a while, it looked like it just might be brighter than our haunted past.