History-making Ben Rice has tools to be more than Yankees flash in the pan
NY Post
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.
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).