Yankees 2026 Season Preview: Ben Rice

The list of position players to make the majors in the Yankees’ organization since Aaron Judge’s 2017 rookie campaign that have made such a great impact right out the gate is small.

Miguel Andujar was fantastic in 2018, but that fizzled out when he tried to play through a labrum tear in 2019. Gleyber Torres wasn’t yet 23 years old by the time he became a two-time All-Star in 2019. Despite not overwhelmingly great offensive numbers, Austin Wells was a Rookie of the Year finalist in 2024, and Jasson Domínguez had a memorable first 10 days in pinstripes before undergoing Tommy John surgery in September 2023.

Ben Rice is older than all of these guys, turning 27 earlier in February. The former 12th-round pick was a very late bloomer who fell under the radar due to COVID-19 wiping out two entire seasons when he was at Dartmouth, and made his way to the majors in June 2024 after forcing the action with tremendous hitting in the minor leagues. After a rough cup of coffee that barely exhausted his rookie eligibility, Rice put on some muscle and clobbered the ball in 2025, forcing his way into the heart of the order as one of the team’s key bats. And despite the tremendous season he had, this might’ve been just the beginning.

2025 statistics: 143 games, 581 plate appearances, .255/.337/.499, 26 HR, 65 RBI, 133 wRC+, 9.4 BB%, 18.9 K%, -6 Defensive Runs Saved, 1 Outs Above Average, 3.0 fWAR

2026 ZiPS DC projections: 130 games, 560 plate appearances, .241/.330/.462, 26 HR, 79 RBI, 121 wRC+, 10.3 BB%, 20.7 K%, 2.5 fWAR

There are 13 batting categories on Baseball Savant’s percentile rankings. Rice was the only qualified player in MLB who was better than the 60th percentile in all 13 categories:

To achieve this, you need to master several different aspects of hitting. You need to be patient, hit for power, display tremendous bat control, make good contact, and make good swing decisions. Rice does all of that, and even if you take off some of the less-important percentiles, he’s still part of a very, very elite class. The fascinating part is that a Savant page that looks this red almost always belongs to an MVP-caliber hitter, not a guy who lost out on a Silver Slugger to Zach McKinstry. That’s why it’s hard to contain excitement over what Rice can become as he enters his athletic prime: he was one of the unluckiest hitters in baseball last season.

Rice’s expected and actual stats slowly moved closer together as the season wound down, but he still underperformed his xwOBA by 36 points, making him the eighth-unluckiest hitter out of 251 qualified bats. For some of these hitters, the gap is between mediocre and average, or average to good. For Rice, the gap is between being great and being an All-MLB caliber hitter.

Why is he so unlucky? Well, he had a 25.2 pulled fly ball percentage, one of the highest in baseball. That, combined with his overall high rate of pulling the ball, does make it slightly easier to defend him due to defensive positioning. Defenses shade to the right side over 72 percent of the time against Rice, one of the league’s highest rates.

But using that as a reason for why Rice is “predictable” and will never be able to close that gap is lazy. Opposing defenses are also extremely sharp when he happens to be in the batter’s box.

Compare that with two Yankees on the opposite level of the spectrum, Aaron Judge (-7 OAA) and Trent Grisham (-9 OAA). Both hit the ball scorching hard, which limits a defender’s margin for error, and thus, yield higher BABIPs, especially in the case of Judge, whose BABIP in 2025 was historically high. Grisham pulls the ball just like Rice and also underperformed his peripherals, but didn’t get this level of defense.

The sky is the limit for Rice at the plate if he replicates that batted ball data. Can we really expect that a player who had a .439 xwOBA, 70.3 HardHit%, and 11.5 Whiff% against four-seam fastballs to only generate a +1 run value again?

The bigger question for Rice is his role and his playing time. The Yankees’ plan is for Rice to be the team’s primary first baseman, who’s also capable of filling in behind the plate. Rice isn’t the strongest framer or blocker (especially compared to Austin Wells and JC Escarra), and has an arm that will be exploited, but he’s far from the worst option to occasionally catch with his offensive tools. There’s a chance Escarra starts the season in Triple-A, and if he does, that’ll mean more reps behind the plate for Rice.

Initially, it seemed that Rice would get significantly more reps against left-handed pitching this year, but the Yankees decided to re-unite with the lefty-killing Paul Goldschmidt, who will certainly eat into Rice’s playing time against tough lefties. This could ultimately be a good idea, but Rice was passable against lefties last season and doesn’t have the level of drastic platoons that Ryan McMahon and Jazz Chisholm Jr. have.

Another potential benefit to bringing back the 38-year-old Goldschmidt is that Rice is still relatively new to first base, and there are worse things in the world than a four-time Gold Glover being a defensive mentor for Rice, who was mediocre defensively at the position last season. He’ll probably be sitting in the dugout late in close games for Goldy, but that shouldn’t cost him too many at-bats.

If he played two weeks less when filling in for an injured Anthony Rizzo in 2024 and Nick Kurtz didn’t exist, there’s a real chance that Rice would’ve been Rookie of the Year in 2025. There are a lot of similarities in the profiles of the Big Amish and Rice, who could both be among the AL’s best first basemen for the next decade. There’s a lot to be excited about with Ben Arroz, and 2026 could be just another step towards superstardom.

See more of the Yankees Previews series here.