Alexander Wilson
The Yankees opened Yankee Stadium for the 2026 season on Friday afternoon the right way, beating the Miami Marlins 8-2 behind a sharp Will Warren start and an offense that looked very much like the best lineup in baseball. Warren went 5.2 innings, allowed four hits and two solo home runs, and struck out six. His ERA sits at 2.70 on the season and he is giving this team exactly what they need while Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodon continue their rehab timelines.
Aaron Judge contributed in the way he always does in that ballpark. But the full story of Friday’s win belongs to Ben Rice, who went 2-for-4 with three RBIs, including a solo home run to right in the seventh inning that sent the Yankee Stadium crowd into a familiar kind of frenzy.
On the season, Rice is slashing .409/.500/.864. Those numbers carry a small sample caveat that any honest person has to acknowledge, but they do not come out of nowhere. They reflect a hitter whose underlying profile has been pointing toward this level of production since before he ever appeared in a major league game.
How the Yankees Found Him
The Yankees selected Rice in the 12th round of the 2021 draft out of Dartmouth. Twelfth-round picks become serviceable depth pieces. They do not typically become run-producing first basemen on a team with legitimate World Series ambitions. The reason Rice defied that trajectory comes down to contact quality and plate discipline that were simply not supposed to exist at that slot in the draft.
His minor league profile showed a patient hitter with plus raw power, an advanced two-strike approach, and exit velocities that looked more like a top-ten pick than someone taken nearly 350 spots into the draft. The Yankees moved him quickly because the data kept telling them the same thing: this player is better than where we found him.
The defensive transition from catcher to first base has been the final piece that turned him from an interesting bat into an everyday player the organization could build around.
First base requires an entirely different set of skills than catching, and Rice approached it the way he approaches his at-bats, deliberately and with patience. He worked specifically on his footwork around the bag and his ability to scoop low throws, which is the part of the position that separates reliable first basemen from liabilities.
Why This Season Feels Like a Genuine Leap
Rice turns 27 in June, and for hitters with his profile, the late-20s are typically where the game slows down enough for the underlying tools to translate consistently. His plate discipline has always been a strength, and in a lineup that includes Judge and Giancarlo Stanton demanding attention from opposing pitchers, Rice sees better pitches in favorable counts than he would on a lesser team. He is capitalizing on that in a way that makes the Yankees’ middle of the order genuinely exhausting to game-plan against.
The short porch in right field has always been a factor at Yankee Stadium, and left-handed power hitters with Rice’s barrel rate tend to take advantage of it. His home run on Friday was not a cheapie. It was a ball hit with authority that would have gone out in most parks. At Yankee Stadium, it just got there faster.
The Yankees drafted a 12th-round pick and got a legitimate everyday contributor on a team chasing a championship. That is not supposed to happen. Ben Rice keeps making it look like the most natural thing in the world.
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