Yankees' Ben Rice? His numbers back up the eye test; he can really hit
Ben Rice #22 of the Yankees celebrates his sixth inning home run against the San Francisco Giants at Yankee Stadium on Saturday, April 12, 2025. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Ben Rice, a catcher/ first baseman by trade, keeps showing up in some unexpected places for the Yankees.
Leadoff hitter. Everyday DH.
But those two spots are only part of the story. Seeing his name in the Yankees’ lineup on a regular basis, which figured to be a long shot a month ago during spring training, could be the least surprising thing about Rice.
It’s what Rice has been doing in those roles that has landed him among some pretty exclusive company — at the top of lists that he probably couldn’t have imagined.
What if we told you that Rice, the fresh-faced Yankees sophomore from Dartmouth, currently is one of the most dangerous hitters in Major League Baseball?
And no, that’s not hyperbole. He’s got the statistics to back it up.
On Saturday, midway through the Yankees’ 8-4 victory over the Giants, Rice’s leadoff homer in the sixth inning — his fourth of the season — momentarily gave him a 1.147 OPS, placing him third on MLB’s list, trailing only teammate Aaron Judge (1.245) and the Mets’ Pete Alonso (1.187).
Rice didn’t end up staying there. His 105.3-mph lineout in the eighth inning dropped him to a 1.121 OPS and fourth place (we’re still at a very early, volatile sample-size section of the season, of course). But he’s still in rarefied air, and however Rice bounces around among those run-production VIPs, there are even more numbers that suggest this meteoric rise at the plate could have staying power.
To explore that, let’s examine his performance on Saturday, when the Yankees relied on Rice to defrost an ice-cold offense that was hitting .190 and averaging 2.2 runs in its previous five games. Making his fifth start in the leadoff spot, which has been a challenging vacancy to fill in recent years for the Yankees, Rice went 2-for-4 with an RBI single, the solo homer and a seven-pitch walk.
A deeper analysis, however, gets into the source of Rice’s productivity. The fifth-inning single came after Rice battled back from an 0-and-2 count, sparked the Yankees’ game-breaking five-run rally and traveled 103.2 mph on its bullet-train trip to centerfield. The sixth-inning homer was a 113.2-mph rocket into the rightfield seats and provided much-needed padding for a lead that seemed fragile on a drizzly, 40-degree afternoon.
Those fireworks also were the latest example of why Rice ranks in the 100th percentile when it comes to exit velocity and hard-hit percentage. More precisely, his 97.5 average exit velo is second only to Alonso’s 97.6 and his 72.0 hard-hit percentage is tops in the majors, with Alonso and Shohei Ohtani behind him at 65.9.
Sharing a leaderboard with those names is wild to begin with, but to be above them? That sounds hard to fathom, but Rice shrugged it off when asked if he spends much time looking at them.
“I try not to,” Rice said, smiling.
Why not?
“You just got to continue to be in the present,” he replied. “Just focus on where you’re at. Just go to the field every day and just compete.”
Last season, Rice was in a much different place, a .171 hitter with a .613 OPS, although he did show flashes of big power (seven homers) during his 50 games in the majors. The signature moment for the kid from Cohasset (Massachusetts) was his three-homer, seven-RBI afternoon against the Red Sox on July 6.
This year? Rice has taken what he’s learned from that bumpy debut season, along with the 10 pounds of muscle he packed on during the winter, and become a wrecking ball for a Yankees team that badly needed both a leadoff hitter (after Gleyber Torres’ free-agent departure) and a regular DH (with Giancarlo Stanton on the shelf indefinitely because of twin elbow issues).
We’re only two weeks into the season, but this clearly is a different Rice. Whether this stunning transformation has the potential to be permanent, time will tell. There are reasons for the Yankees to be optimistic, though. Rice is among the highest percentile in a bunch of plate-production stats, and those are analytical trends that could stick around.
“You would think,” manager Aaron Boone said. “Those were a lot of things that were kind of underneath last year, even when he went through some struggles. He was still not being rewarded a little bit for some pretty good contact at times. So I feel like he’s taking that to another level.
“I feel like he’s in a way better place, and a better hitter, and just a year more mature — physically, mentally. And playing with a lot of confidence. I mean, his at-bat quality is really good.”
In discussing the Yankees’ outburst Saturday, Rice’s name was the first to come up. He’s become the tone-setter for the rest of the lineup, a group that has three straight MVPs follow him: Judge, Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt. Bellinger’s RBI triple supplied the Yankees’ opening run in the first inning, but when he talked about the single that drove in Rice in the fifth, he credited the kid atop the order.
“The same thing that we saw in spring — it hasn’t really changed,” Bellinger said. “He’s just locked in. Locked into his plan, his approach. Guy that hits the ball extremely hard and it’s very fun to watch. It’s very impressive.”
As for Rice, maybe he’s just where he’s supposed to be. And the Yankees definitely need him there, mashing away, going places nobody could have anticipated.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
