Ready for games, Yankees’ Anthony Volpe details tweak that could be a game changer

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Dressed in slacks and a sports jacket, Anthony Volpe entered the Yankees clubhouse on Sunday morning, pulling a small suitcase to his back-wall locker stall. There was a slight smile on his face.

After spending the winter and spring in Tampa rehabbing his left shoulder, the shortstop traveled back to New York with the Yankees after Sunday’s 5-4 loss to the Rays.

Volpe will begin the final steps in his recovery from Oct. 14 surgery to repair a partially torn labrum.

Volpe has an exam with team doctor Christopher Ahmad scheduled for Monday, and assuming nothing unexpected crops up, he’ll begin a rehab assignment this week. The Double-A Somerset Patriots are home for games Tuesday through Sunday against the Reading Fightin’ Phils.

“My family’s happy,” said Volpe, a Watchung, N.J., native who now lives in Manhattan. “I’m so excited to just play. I’m probably the most excited I’ve ever been.”

Volpe says he’s completely healthy.

“Doing treatments and doing exercises, (the shoulder) just keeps improving and keeps getting better,” he said. “Every day I feel better than the last day.”

From April 1 through Saturday, Volpe prepped for rehab games by getting a bunch of daily at-bats in live BPs at the Yankees’ player development complex in Tampa.

“I feel like I’m not really rehabbing,” he said. “I feel like a normal player just doing what I’ve got to do to get ready.”

When Volpe plays his first game, he’ll start a rehab clock that can last 30 days. The Yankees won’t know how long they’ll delay Volpe’s return from the injured list until they see how his body reacts to a heavy workload of game action, but he’ll probably be in the minors for at least two weeks.

“I’ve got to see how I feel,” said Volpe, who turns 25 on April 28. “I just want to see how my body reacts (to) back-to-back (games). I want to play close to every day as much as I can.

“I feel like my body’s ready. Wearing all the sensors and catapult workload stuff, I know that I’ve been doing as much as I would be if I was playing.”

Volpe believed that he was ready for game action when he felt no shoulder discomfort during his live BPs and in fielding drills, which included diving.

“When you check a swing and it didn’t feel like your shoulder’s gonna pop out, stuff like that,” he said. “You go in the field and you dive, you realize that’s good, too.

“I feel like I checked off all the rehab mental challenges and now I’m just a player getting ready to come back and help the team.”

He knows he still has to check those same boxes in rehab games before rejoining the Yankees.

“When you’re just hitting in the cage or hitting off the machine, you’re not fully committing or checking the swing or doing little stuff like that,” he said.

Volpe hasn’t liked sitting on the sidelines and watching the Yankees from afar.

“You watch on TV, you can text after a game … but it’s like a helpless feeling at the same time," he said. “That’s what you miss the most. You miss the camaraderie being with the boys.

“You live and die with the guys. You know what they’re trying to do. You’re watching the pitchers to imagine you’re in the box.”

Coming off the worst of his three seasons, hitting and fielding, Volpe believes he made an adjustment to his swing that could result in better results.

“I just cleaned up my bat path,” he said. “I’m keeping it on a plane for a lot longer. We found some stuff where it kind of went wrong.”

Volpe’s .212 average in 153 games last season was a big drop from .243 in 2025, and his .663 OPS was the lowest in his three years as a big leaguer. His strikeout rate has been high throughout his career at 27.8% in 2023, 22.6% in ’24 and 25.2% last season.

“I think the stuff we worked on is very subjective, and I feel like I can make adjustments,” he said.

The Yankees are excited about Volpe’s progress. They still think he’s an elite defensive shortstop even though he regressed from winning a Gold Glove as a rookie and being a Gold Glove finalist in 2024 to leading the league in errors last season.

The Yankees are hopeful that Volpe can improve his batting average while maintaining the solid production that he had last season: 32 doubles, 19 homers, 72 RBIs and 18 stolen bases.

“How well it’s been going for him physically the last six-eight weeks and the amount of at-bats he’s been able to replicate the last 10 days (to) two weeks hopefully have set him up to hit the ground running in his rehab assignment,” manager Aaron Boone said. “And then we’ll go from there.”

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