This was one of those unwelcome-to-the-big-league moments that remind everyone how humbling baseball can be.
One day you are hitting a big eighth-inning home run and getting sent out smiling nervously for the first curtain call of your dream 21-game Yankees career.
And then the next day, in the 22nd game of your dream Yankees career, you are committing an error on a routine George Springer ground ball to start Clarke Schmidt’s sixth-inning implosion and striking out swinging three times against Kevin Gausman during an 0-for-4 afternoon of a 5-1 loss to the Blue Jays.
Mama Volpe said there’d be days like this, just as Mama Jeter said there’d be days like this when her boy Derek began living his dream way back when.
Young Volpe offered no excuses for the costly error.
“That’s on me,” he said. “We should be off the field there easy. It’s a play that I feel like we make every single [time] in training and everything like that. I definitely expect myself to make it for me and for the team.”
He was asked if the ball took a late bad hop.
“I don’t think good fielders get bad hops,” Volpe said, “so that’s on me.”
No one needs to worry about Volpe being shaken over it. He has shown that he has the right makeup for this game and for this market.
“I don’t think anyone at this level needs any reminders, but that’s just baseball,” Volpe told The Post. “That’s what makes it great is the ups and the downs, so that’s part of it. It comes with the territory.”
Volpe didn’t have to face the music afterwards. It tells you everything you need to know about him that he willingly did.
“That’s part of it, and I want to be accountable and be responsible for everything that happens,” he said. “At the end of the day all I can do is focus on what I can control, and doing stuff like that, that’s just part of it.”
Volpe led off the ninth against sidearmer righty reliever Adam Cimber and lined out to third to drop his average to .188.
Volpe was hardly the only culprit on a day when Schmidt pitched into the fifth inning for the first time this season and resembled the fifth starter Aaron Boone has needed him to be with Carlos Rodon, Luis Severino and Frankie Montas still on the shelf.
Schmidt, who finished with a career-high eight strikeouts, had retired the first 13 Jays before Matt Chapman lined a first-pitch sinker to right for a double and Schmidt took a one-hitter into the sixth, when Volpe’s one-out error preceded Yankee killer Vlad Guerrero’s two-run HR into the left-field seats and Daulton Varsho’s second-deck blast to right.
Schmidt, aggressive with his sinker, deserved better as all three runs were unearned.
“I gotta do a better job of being able to pick Volpe up on that, and 10 out of 10 times he’s making that play,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt deserved better because the Yanks managed six hits and looked compromised in their first series loss of the season by the absence of Giancarlo Stanton, Josh Donaldson and Harrison Bader. The Yankees scored five runs over the three games with 18 hits — three of which came in the ninth, including an Anthony Rizzo homer, against Cimber.
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“I think it’s just ebbs and flows of baseball,” Volpe said. “It’s a long season. … I don’t think anyone’s really … definitely not panicking, but we’re just gonna keep working.”
No panic in this kid.