At the least, Ben Rice is going to step into a lineage with Kevin Maas, Shane Spencer and Shelley Duncan — Yankees prospects who arrived like meteors and never came close again to matching initial power-laden outbursts.
If that is all there is, then Rice will have played an important role for the 2024 Yankees, providing perhaps the best feel-good moment of this season and certainly the one that removed the most stress from a team that was teetering.
But his on-balance approach and a smooth easy swing with surprising heft creates a chance to envision a lot more than just instant Rice. He has taken basically one good at-bat after another since his June 18 debut. And on Saturday, with the Yankees coming off their most disheartening loss of this season, playing their worst sustained ball in many years and all kinds of ugly questions about focus and hustle percolating, Rice for at least one day replaced anxiety with exultation. From his first at-bat to his last, Rice flipped the subject (at least for a day) from an MLB-worst 4-14 run to a 14-4 rout of the Red Sox.
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Rice became the first Yankees rookie with a three-homer game. He became the first Yankees rookie since July 23, 1925, to drive in seven runs. That was an Ivy League (Columbia) product named Lou Gehrig, who in April of that season stepped into first base after the veteran lefty-swinger Wally Pipp came down with a headache and never got the job back. Rice is an Ivy League (Dartmouth) product who stepped in at first base after the veteran lefty-swinger Anthony Rizzo was lost after suffering a fracture near his right wrist June 16.
Now perspective check. When Maas was setting records for fewest at-bats to reach various homer totals in his 1990 rookie campaign while filling in for the injured Don Mattingly, the Yankees began to do the gymnastics of how both might coexist in the future. So there is a long way from here to there. Rizzo holds an important leadership position within the Yankee ecosystem.
But Rizzo had not been hitting well and the earliest he can return from the 60-day IL is Aug. 16. So Rice is going to get plenty of opportunities to show he is a true 2024 answer — and beyond. Because an inexpensive high-end lefty bat that provides on-base skills and power would allow the Yankees to more aggressively spend elsewhere (fill in here whatever you imagine the price for Hal Steinbrenner to retain Juan Soto).
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That is all down the road. In the present, the Yankees entered struggling in every phase and coming off a 5-3, 10-inning loss Friday to Boston in which they were one strike from winning and lost amid a lack of attention to detail and absent energy.
The hope was that their ace, Gerrit Cole, could begin reversing this tide. But the Red Sox did for four-plus innings against Cole what they had done in the ninth inning Friday in forcing a blown save on Clay Holmes — extending at-bats, soaring the pitch count and capitalizing on mistakes. Thus, the Yankees were going to need a hero from the opposite side of seniority and pay scale.
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Rice, in his 17th game and third as the leadoff hitter, homered to open the first and then hit 406-foot three-run homers off Chase Anderson in the fifth and seventh innings — the first to break the game open and then to culminate what Aaron Boone labeled “a legendary day.” At that point from the on-deck circle, Aaron Judge urged both the fans to grow louder and Rice to come out of the dugout as Soto stepped out of the batters box. And Rice, still on a high, was confused at first before he found the dugout opening to bring a huge standing ovation and the happiest moment the Yanks have had in weeks.
“Obviously, we’re going through it and so we’re looking for any kind of success, really,” Cole said, “I think it’s a little bit greater than that. It’s a historical day, a magical day.”
Rice grew up a Yankee fan in suburban Boston and says his expectation was the Yankees or Red Sox were going to draft him in 2021 — the Yanks did a superb job in knowing a player who did not play college ball in 2020-21 as those Ivy seasons were scratched due to COVID.
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His bat has been his calling card up the minor league ranks, and just watching the first 60 plate appearances of his MLB career, Rice is hardly ever off-balance and fooled. He has acumen for what is a strike or not. Boone uses the term “slow heartbeat.” The game does not seem too fast for him. The magnitude of the Yankees and large crowds and major league pitching does not seem to faze him. Nor has the losing that has so far enveloped his Yankee term.
And when the Yankees needed a hero Saturday to try to fight back against the mounting negativity, Rice delivered three huge blows. At the least, he joins Maas, Spencer and Duncan. But that swing, that approach and that serenity in the storm, it does make you wonder if this can be way more than where flash meets pan.
