Who’s the real Anthony Volpe?

A lot of folks looked to Bobby Witt Jr., who was at least somewhat of a letdown in his first season before a massive coming out party in 2023, as a potential model for Anthony Volpe. Hoping for Volpe to jump from a two-win player to a six-win player might have been a little pie-in-the-sky ... except that FanGraphs Depth Charts is now projecting him for a five-win season all told. As good as Juan Soto and Aaron Judge have been, Volpe has been right there with them all season.

There were some eyebrows raised when Volpe won a Gold Glove last year, but boy that looks like more of an omen all the time. He’s the third-best shortstop in all of baseball by OAA and sixth by DRS. A good defensive shortstop with no bat—basically what he was last year—is going to prove a high enough floor to put up two-ish wins a year. But I want to talk about Volpe’s ceiling.

Ceilings matter because wins aren’t distributed linearly. A total of 362 players tallied at least 200 PA in 2023, and 234 of them put up two wins or less; just eight put up six or more. In spite of what the “spread the money around” crowd might thing, a six-win player is more than three times worth what a two-win player can produce. Their contracts reflect that, non-Ronald Acuña Jr. division.

To talk ceilings, we need to get out of the defense and baserunning, since while those help to establish a floor, there’s just not a lot of value on that side of the ball. As to the baserunning, as we saw last year that you have to get on base for your speed and decisions to matter. So it’s really all about the stick, and how much of this 128 wRC+ is sustainable over 162.

So to start, we know that Volpe’s xwOBA, or, what his performance should look like based on contact quality and plate discipline, is about 30 points lower than his wOBA, and that delta is in the top quartile of overperformance. That alone isn’t enough to say “he’s going to get worse,” though, since certain players always do overperform xwOBA.

Now, we can’t say today that Anthony Volpe is the same as Mookie Betts, but the former MVP is one of those guys who has overperformed xwOBA in all but two of his MLB seasons, and every year since 2019. He’s overperforming at the time of writing by exactly the same amount as Volpe, and I think one of the reasons comes out of the new Statcast swing tracking metrics.

Neither Volpe nor Betts boast the eye-popping bat speed of someone like Giancarlo Stanton, but their distribution is wider. This is what we might classically call “bat control.” This is the ability to vary your swings depending on what’s being pitched to you.

This isn’t a Giancarlo Stanton swing; he can’t really do this. Volpe’s not going to hit a ball 119 mph, but he is going to hit that pitch with a varied swing, and at 75 mph and 20 degrees, this ball is a hit 98.7 percent of the time.

This is where Statcast can help us pull apart what “luck” is. A ball hit with a .987 xBA isn’t luck, and while Volpe’s first glance on Baseball Savant doesn’t pop with red, deeper tools like examining his swing and how he’s able to modulate it encourage us that he’s going to produce balls in play like that one above — not luck, a specific set of conditions that tends to yield hits. As of now, contact quality is part of something like xwOBA, but the ability to vary swings is not.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s all roses. Look back at that distribution between Betts and Volpe, and how the tail end of Betts’ distribution is a much faster swing than Tony’s. They can both vary their hacks to match what’s given to them, but Betts can get it going a little more than Volpe’s shown, where the power difference is. So, Volpe isn’t quite Mookie Betts; what a letdown.

Volpe’s also adapting to a slightly different role this year, which I think plays into this varied swing approach — and why his power is down. He doesn’t have to slug home runs; he’s hitting in front of arguably the best hitter in baseball, and arguably the best hitter in baseball. That OBP has jumped 60 points this year, and while I would like to see a better than .350 mark from the leadoff hitter, both his walk rate jump and the reduction in whiffs — brought along by these varied swings — are good signs going forward.

The last strike is in fact the strikeouts. Volpe has lowered his strikeout rate almost five points from last year, making more contact all the time, but at a league-average rate, he’s still not putting as many balls in play with those favorable conditions as someone like Betts, or indeed Witt, both of whom again hit with a little more thump than Tony Fox.

So what do we have in Anthony Volpe?

It’s telling that while Depth Charts thinks he’s a five-win player over the whole season, they also think he’s a 110 wRC+ mid-level projection. That leaves some upside, and while I do think that tail-end bat speed limits his overall power, a 125-ish wRC+ is probably him at his best; or, what he’s doing right now. With good-to-elite defense, that’s a more valuable player at the ceiling than someone like Gleyber Torres.

We started this post talking about the hope that Volpe would follow Bobby Witt Jr.’s trajectory. Right now, Witt’s got a little more power, a little better defense, and a little less whiff. Still, a lot of what Volpe’s doing right now is real — he may not be playing like this for all 162, but I’m going to buy stock in AVP and hold.