The early news on Giancarlo Stanton isn’t entirely encouraging, as the Yankees may not have their slugging DH on Opening Day when they host the Brewers. His shutdown has (rightfully) brought about concerns about the team’s offense and how they’ll address the hole in the middle of their lineup, but they may have an internal solution.
Ben Rice has shown up to camp looking better than ever; it is a cliche this time of year, but the lefty-swinging catcher has added some muscle and it has turned some heads. The backup catcher job is open and Rice is expected to get some serious run during Spring Training as a catcher, but the team could also utilize him as their DH. A power hitter who displayed an excellent approach at the plate last season, Rice is beloved in the Yankees’ organization, and the perfect storm for him to make the team out of camp is brewing right before our eyes.
How Ben Rice Could Be the Yankees’ Sparkplug This Season
Ben Rice has the potential not just to be a useful bench player on the Yankees, but a premium bat on a World Series contender if he puts it all together in 2025. Last season was a good test for the young catcher, as he displayed many positive traits, ranging from a strong feel for the strike zone to excellent quality of contact metrics. The results weren’t pretty; a .613 OPS and -0.3 fWAR in your age-25 season don’t exactly bode well for future success, but this is where context and underlying metrics come into play.
If Ben Rice had played 100% of his games at any MLB ballpark, he would have either matched his 7 HR total (Detroit/Kansas City) or hit more homers according to Baseball Savant. Considering that Rice took just two of his 178 PAs in either of the two ballparks where he would have been stuck at seven, it makes zero sense that he ended up with a .178 ISO and .186 BABIP, as he became the first hitter to barrel 15% or more of his batted balls and post both a BABIP and ISO below .200 in the Statcast Era (min. 150 PAs).
There aren’t many skill-based reasons to believe that Rice should have posted that low of a BABIP or ISO either; he finished with a roughly average Whiff% while making excellent swing decisions and doing tons of damage on contact in his 50-game trial run last year.
What did seem to do him in was the abundance of warning-track shots he hit in 2024, with over 7% of his batted balls becoming outs at the warning track. Ben Rice could have chalked that up to luck and moved into 2025 with the mentality that repeating his same process unchanged would result in a productive season, but he decided to change things up.
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Ben Rice has added some muscle to his frame, giving him some more juice when he swings that could result in some home runs that he wasn’t able to get last season. Jake Mintz of the Cespedes Family BBQ Podcast tweeted about witnessing Rice hit a ball off of the scoreboard in batting practice, and while that cannot be compared to in-game performance, it felt relatively unappreciated by social media.
George M. Steinbrenner Field has its scoreboard in left field, not right field, meaning Rice launched a ball 400+ feet to left centerfield in that swing. We’ve seen Rice flirt with his power to left field, but at the Major League level, those batted balls resulted in long flyouts, which go down the same as a three-pitch strikeout in the box score. That extra juice in his swing could turn a lot of those deflating flyballs into game-breaking home runs, and that would have a monumental effect on his OPS.
Four batted balls stand out as 50/50 flyballs that would have left the yard if Ben Rice had gotten just a little more behind it, with all of them coming in situations where a home run would have given the Yankees a lead. Flipping those four flyouts into home runs would result in a .454 SLG% and a .742 OPS, sandwiching in-between Giancarlo Stanton (.773) and Austin Wells (.718).
Warning track power is mostly used as a way to joke about someone coming just short of hitting a home run, but in Ben Rice’s case, it seemed to be the difference between a permanent spot in the lineup and a demotion to Triple-A. He probably came a combined 40 feet short of giving Brian Cashman zero reason to invest heavily at first base, and the addition of some muscle in 2025 might now make him the hitter the Yankees hope he can be.