Yankees' young first baseman might be primed for huge 2025 season
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Ben Rice came up during the 2024 season once Anthony Rizzo went down with an arm fracture, and while the Yankees seemed to have caught lightning in a bottle at first, a harsh slump would relegate him to Triple-A. It wasn’t the stint that the left-handed slugger hoped for, but there were plenty of positives to take from this first taste of the Major Leagues. He displayed immense power to go with excellent swing decisions and surprisingly high contact rates, but this upcoming season will prove to be the most important of his young career.
With the Yankees likely to add a first baseman over the winter, Rice will have to be ready to play at a moment’s notice rather than competing for a job out of camp, but there are plenty of reasons to believe he could break out in 2025.
Ben Rice’s First Stint With the Yankees Left Plenty of Upside
This past season was a mixed bag for Ben Rice, who successfully made the leap from Double-A to the Major Leagues but hit the skids after a couple of weeks in pinstripes. His Minor League season was dominant as he launched 24 home runs with a .967 OPS and 163 wRC+ across both Double-A and Triple-A, flashing tons of power while making excellent swing decisions and looking like the kind of hitter who could translate well to the big leagues.
From a results standpoint, it’s impossible to argue with a 73 wRC+ and .613 OPS; that’s not good enough for an everyday player, especially at a position like first base. Despite the ugly numbers, there were plenty of positive signs under the hood that could indicate that Ben Rice had a strong process at the plate that throughout a larger sample size would result in strong production at the plate.
A combination of above-average contact rates, excellent swing decisions, and good power will almost always result in a good Major League hitter, and these percentile scores come from his big-league stint. It’s one thing for a rookie to hit the ball hard and run up a strong xwOBA because of good barrel rates alone, but the ability to do so while also grading out as firmly above-average in terms of Zone Contact and being above-average in Whiff% against non-fastballs is encouraging.
He didn’t pound the ball into the ground, nor did he have plate discipline issues, so why did he struggle over 50 games with the Yankees? Well, I think the biggest reason why has to do with luck. A .186 BABIP is simply not sustainable for someone who hits the ball as well as Rice does, even in a ballpark like Yankee Stadium that usually suppresses left-handed batting average because of its small right-field dimensions.
The average left-handed hitter at Yankee Stadium had a .268 BABIP and .234 BA, whereas Ben Rice’s BABIP falls nearly .100 points below that while having better quality contact numbers. For context, his BABIP was so low that if you filter for hitters with at least 150 PAs, it’s the third-worst mark in all of baseball ahead of Alex Jackson and Miguel Vargas, who don’t come close to possessing the quality of contact numbers that Rice does.
Nothing would suggest that he should be a massive BABIP underperformer, and while some may scoff at the notion that it’s largely luck-based, data would suggest that you can be subject to terrible luck over a 50-game sample size. Derek Carty revised Russell Carleton’s stabilization research on baseball metrics, and the data on when these kinds of stats stabilize would indicate to me that Ben Rice is far from the point of ruling out bad luck altogether:
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With just 178 Plate Appearances, 152 At-Bats, and 109 Balls in Play, Ben Rice is well short of where one would ask if he just doesn’t have ideal batted ball sprays. Not only is there not enough signal in the sample size to completely ignore the role that bad luck played in his poor play but there’s no evidence to suggest that he should have severely underperformed his underlying metrics.
A 34.9% Sweet Spot% is above the Major League average, and Rice pulled more flyballs than the average hitter did as well. A 27% strikeout rate is high but most of those came from called strike threes, his 25.8% Whiff% is roughly average for a Major League hitter. His biggest flaw, which is his underwhelming play against high-velocity, wouldn’t be enough to explain away the discrepancy either.
Not only was his .293 wOBA higher than his .290 xwOBA against those pitches, but the league-average wOBA of .308 in those scenarios isn’t high enough to even call it a devastating flaw. Hitters like Luis Arraez, Pete Alonso, Wyatt Langford, and Brendan Donovan either matched or performed worse than Rice against high heat in terms of wOBA, and they’re all firmly above-average hitters with strong projections for the 2025 season.
In fact, Steamer projects Ben Rice to be a similar hitter to someone like Max Muncy in 2025, and I’m kind of digging that player comparison:
Both players won’t win a batting title but bring discipline and power to the equation thanks to their violent swings, and if the Yankees could mold Ben Rice into that kind of hitter it could change the outlook of their future at 1B dramatically. It would be unwise to not add a veteran to shore up the position, but I also believe there’s something lost in completely giving up on Rice because of bad luck.
The skills are all there, and while everyone’s starting to leave the Ben Rice bandwagon, it’s important to remember that even great players can go through a 50-game stretch of underwhelming results with suboptimal luck. Baseball is not the best sport for knee-jerk reactions although it feels like the one that makes you want to yell one out the most.
Even if the Yankees get a first baseman, you never know when an emergency option could be needed, and Ben Rice could luck into a chance to show the world he’s a capable big leaguer in 2025.
