Ryan Garcia
Last season the Yankees placed Ben Rice on their Opening Day roster after news broke that Giancarlo Stanton would be out for a significant portion of the season with a double-elbow injury.
He ran with the opportunity and never looked back even after Stanton returned and lit the baseball world on fire, finishing the 2025 campaign with a 133 wRC+ and 26 home runs.
The results said he was one of the ~30 best hitters in the game, but the expected results pointed to an even higher ceiling, one where Rice is a truly elite bat.
A scorching-hot finish to his 2025 season where the poor luck finally began to swing the other way has carried into 2026 as he’s proving to the world that last year wasn’t a fluke.
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Ben Rice’s Numbers With the Yankees Haved Reached The Elite Status
Since the start of the 2025 season, Ben Rice has the 15th-best OPS in MLB (min. 500 PAs) and the 12th-best wRC+, tied with hitters such as Corbin Carroll, Pete Alonso, and Ketel Marte over that stretch.
Only 19 hitters in baseball under those qualifications have a SLG% of .500 or greater and Ben Rice is one of them, and the aforementioned Marte is the only hitter in that group who has a lower strikeout rate than he does.
This is a result of Rice’s unique blend of bat-to-ball abilities and excellent raw power, he’s able to impact the ball for damage contact consistently without the trade-off of a high Whiff%.
Being able to avoid the low contact rates that often come with his violent and powerful swing is a trait that should keep Rice in the middle of the Yankees’ offense for a while, and projections are fully bought into his breakout.
Will Ben Rice live up to those exact projections? It’s impossible to know for sure, but there’s more than enough reason to think he could finish this season as a top 10 hitter in the game by wRC+ and OPS.
You could even make the argument that he can exceed these projections with how elite his offensive profile is, which would be supported by his excellent expected numbers.
Baseball Savant’s Expected wOBA, which attempts to estimate what a hitter’s wOBA should have been based on their strikeouts, walks, and batted ball data is a useful tool in analyzing how sustainable someone’s production is.
Ben Rice has a .399 xwOBA since 2025, which is only surpassed by Kyle Schwarber (.403), Juan Soto (.424), Shohei Ohtani (.425), and Aaron Judge (.453).
Compare that to a .368 wOBA over that stretch and you can accurately deduce that Rice’s offensive surge isn’t just sustainable, it’s also likely worse than it should be based on the quality of his plate appearances.
xwOBA is not a predictive metric but rather a descriptive metric, meaning that his wOBA won’t be .399 solely based on those expected numbers.
What it does tell you is that if Ben Rice were to continue maintaining this kind of offensive profile, he could be one of the 5-6 best hitters in the game.
Greater exposure to left-handed pitching should reduce that number, but not by a massive margin as Rice has traken 21.9% of his plate appearances since 2025 against LHP.
A full-time player will see between 25-30% of their plate appearances come against a lefty even when adjusting for the fact that managers are more likely to attack Rice with a southpaw.
Given his above-average OPS against LHP since 2025, I would be stunned if his offensive profile collapsed from utterly elite to just good over a 5-9% increase in his split versus lefties.
This is one of the best hitters in the sport by every measurable way, and if the Yankees can keep getting this from Ben Rice, they could have the best lineup in the American League once again.
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