No matter how well José Caballero played in this first month of the season, he was running on borrowed time. The Yankees always intended for Anthony Volpe to slide back into the starting shortstop role when he recovered from a torn labrum that affected his play for much of the 2025 season, and they made that clear when they didn’t make a single infield addition in the offseason.
Right?
This is what everyone in Yankeeland assumed was going to happen, regardless of Caballero’s performance. The team had
been vocal about their belief in Volpe as a key piece of the team’s future, consistently defending his performance through last season and into his offseason surgery. When he began a rehab assignment, it looked like his return was inevitable.
But the young shortstop reached the end of his 20-day rehab window yesterday, and the Yankees elected to option him to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. The fact he entered the year with all three of his minor league options remaining makes it so that the team isn’t absorbing any risk if this is intended to just get him a week or two more of game action before returning, but there’s a sense that some of the trust has waned in the 25-year-old, and Caballero’s performance hasn’t helped Volpe’s case at all.
A month into the season, Caballero has performed admirably in his time as the team’s shortstop, contributing some clutch moments offensively with steady defense and aggressive baserunning. Entering play on Monday, he’s slashing .259/.306/.405 with a 99 wRC+ with four home runs, 12 RBIs, 13 stolen bases, and 0.8 fWAR. He paces the American League with 7 Defensive Runs Saved and has added value on the basepaths, even after getting thrown out four times in two games last week.
When comparing him directly to Volpe, even if you give Volpe’s 2025 defensive regression some grace due to his labrum injury, the decision makes plenty of sense; the last we saw of Volpe was of a floundering player, and Caballero is performing very well. But if we’re talking about optimizing the Yankees’ roster, the best move would still be to pencil in a healthy Volpe at shortstop and put Caballero back in a role where he’s excellent, as a super-utilityman.
While Caballero has looked better offensively in his brief Yankee tenure than Volpe has in his three-year career, a look under the hood reveals that we shouldn’t expect this much longer from Caballero. Even though faster players will generally run a better BABIP due to their speed (see: Chandler Simpson), Caballero is vastly overperforming his .267 xwOBA, which sits in the 8th percentile. He doesn’t hit the ball hard, has a minuscule walk rate, and his overall quality of contact is much closer to his mediocre 2024 season than his strong finish to 2025.
Compare that to what we saw out of Volpe in 2025, where the expected stats aren’t too much better (.301 xwOBA), but the quality of contact is closer to league average, and there’s more potential in his bat if he can somehow make more consistent contact. Despite his overall numbers being near-identical through three years in terms of wRC+ and OPS, his peripherals have improved, particularly in chase rate and bat speed.
Defensively, it makes sense to give pause to before handing one of the most important positions on the field back to someone who was awful there in 2025, but the Yankees believe that the labrum injury affected him far more than initially believed, causing him to overcompensate in some regards. You could accuse the Yankees of being optimistic there, but we have substantial two-year sample size of Volpe being a strong defender at the position when , combining to produce 21 DRS and 15 Outs Above Average in his first two seasons. Many of his errors last year came from off-line throws, something that could’ve been affected by the shoulder injury.
But the biggest reason to move forward with the team’s initial plans for this season is to optimize the 26-man roster in the absolute best fashion possible. The Yankees’ bench, as currently constructed, isn’t very flexible with the specific roles that Amed Rosario, Paul Goldschmidt, and JC Escarra play. While Rosario can play other positions than third base, it’s not a serious consideration most days.
As of right now, Max Schuemann is the most flexible player on the bench. Schuemann nominally provides versatility, with the ability to play second and third, not to mention his limited experience at short and in the outfield, but the team tellingly hasn’t really opted to use that versatility in the week he’s been on the roster. The role Schuemann fills at this moment can use an upgrade.
Caballero’s defensive prowess gives him a high enough floor that he isn’t a bottom-of-the-barrel shortstop in the league when his bat falls back to earth, but there might not be a better bench player in all of MLB if he’s put back in that role. He’s able to play five different positions at a solid level, having already shown his aptitude at shortstop while also being able to play second base, third base, left field, and right field.
Not only is he a capable defensive replacement at many different positions, but he also exists as a viable pinch-hitting and platoon candidate at these positions. Is there a tough lefty that you might not want to play Trent Grisham or Jazz Chisholm Jr. against? Caballero’s OPS against left-handers is .800 over the last two seasons, with an xwOBA of .320.
His best attribute of all, though, is his speed, which could now be deployed in the biggest spots of the game. To start the season, the Yankees were reduced to using Randal Grichuk as their best pinch-running option, and even though the recent moves have had either Schuemann or even Jasson Domínguez in that role depending on the day, Caballero as the team’s top pinch-runner would be tremendously more valuable once Giancarlo Stanton returns from injury.
When you factor all that in, Caballero provides much more to the bench than Schuemann can, and that’s only possible when sliding Volpe back into shortstop. Think of it this way; shifting from Caballero to Volpe, if the latter is healthy, shouldn’t be too big of a dropoff, while Caballero provides a massive upgrade on whomever he’s replacing on the bench. And of course, Caballero would likely prove to be a bench player only in name, coming in as a pinch-runner, defensive replacement, or starting against lefties so often that he’d find himself on the field more often than not even if he isn’t the everyday shortstop.
None of this matters if there are legitimate baseball reasons why the Yankees do not want to activate Volpe, but if this is merely just to get him more at-bats in the minor leagues and he’s only a week or two away from donning the pinstripes again, he should reclaim his old job. The Volpe we saw in 2023 and 2024was flawed, but that version of Volpe would still make the Yankees roster better right now.
