Ben Rice Is Laying Waste to the American League

Coming into the season, the ZiPS projections typically noticed the Yankees as having decrease divisional odds than standings based mostly on different projection programs and methodologies. One of the largest causes for that was, paradoxically, considered one of the greatest issues a baseball crew can possess: Aaron Judge with a signed contract. Since ZiPS makes an attempt to simulate the results of accidents, together with season-ending ones, the Yankees offense took a fully brutal hit any time Judge was absent. In the system’s present season simulations, that impact has been mitigated considerably by the improved projections of 1 man: first baseman Ben Rice.

Judge’s courtroom is a terrifying dystopia wherein defendant pitchers discover scant justice and nearly positive punishment. And whereas this choose is usually content material to deal with executions himself, it’s Rice who has been working the guillotine the most steadily in 2026. Through the first three weeks of the season, Rice has put up a .362/.500/.745 line, good for a league-leading 241 wRC+, and has already hit the 1-WAR mark.

Naturally, when you’ve an OPS nearing 1.300, a great variety of issues have in all probability gone your means, actually greater than have gone in opposition to you. Rice’s batting common, fourth in baseball amongst qualifiers, is of course helped rather a lot by a .500 BABIP, which has but to show sustainable at the large league stage. But what makes Rice’s season so wonderful is that even for those who take a few of the helium out of his seasonal line, it nonetheless tells the story of a batter who could be rising as considered one of baseball’s elite offensive skills.

ZiPS has a built-in device that estimates a participant’s line purely from StatCast knowledge, and unsurprisingly, Rice’s BABIP comes down significantly when the superior knowledge, with that .500 BABIP turning into a mere .318 BABIP. But that’s not sufficient to take the oomph out of his season-to-date efficiency, not by a protracted shot. When you tabulate the ZiPS changes for BABIP, in addition to his house run, stroll, and strikeout charges, Rice’s line nonetheless comes out as a sturdy .277/.392/.629, good for a 1.021 OPS. To put a 1.021 OPS in context, amongst qualifiers, that will have trailed solely Judge in 2025, and solely Judge and Shohei Ohtani in 2024. The final time a participant who wasn’t clearly headed to Cooperstown had a greater OPS in a full season was again in 2019, when Christian Yelich, Cody Bellinger, and Nelson Cruz all managed it.

Of course, Rice is unlikely to be fairly this good over the course of a full season. Baseball is a recreation of adjustment and re-adjustment, and the volatility of gamers’ small-sample numbers strongly helps the thought of there being important ebb and circulate of their “true talent,” as summary an idea as which may be. Rice can’t sustain that BABIP, however hitting the ball actually laborious is a vital element of prolonged success for an influence hitter. He was hardly a slouch final yr, with a 55.8% hard-hit fee (seventh in baseball). But this yr, that’s improved to 70.0% in the early going, trailing solely Fernando Tatis Jr., and his 96.7 mph common exit velocity ranks fourth in baseball.

Even with simply 30 balls in play, a 70% hard-hit fee is tough to obtain. Of the 11,990 runs of 30 balls in play in 2025, solely 128 had a hard-hit fee higher than Rice’s 70%. The checklist of 17 gamers who managed the feat at any level in 2025 is a who’s who of superstars (Ohtani, Judge, Juan Soto), gamers with a historical past of hitting balls very laborious (Kyle Schwarber, Manny Machado), and, surprisingly, Michael Harris II. One of the causes that some of these numbers have confirmed helpful, particularly when projecting hitters, is that they don’t show the similar stage of volatility that the extra conventional stats do. And what’s extra, Rice has completed this whereas pitchers have proven him higher respect, throwing considerably fewer fastballs, and fewer pitches in the strike zone, than in 2025.

Rice’s development arrow was already firmly pointing up. A few months in the past, I ran the numbers to see which gamers had seen their 2026 forecasts improve the most during the 2025 season. Rice ranked sixth amongst the hitters when it comes to the largest enchancment. He was projected for a 128 wRC+ getting into this season, however his rest-of-season wRC+ has already jumped to 137. The in-season mannequin is easier than the full ZiPS mannequin (in any other case it couldn’t run day-after-day), and with StatCast knowledge included, ZiPS now sees Rice as a 143-wRC+ hitter the remainder of the means. That’s the seventh-best rest-of-season wRC+ projection in ZiPS.

Running the full ZiPS mannequin for the first three weeks of the season, Rice has had the second-largest bump in projected wRC+ of any hitter in baseball (the largest change is Jordan Walker’s). As you may count on, that’s been sufficient to meaningfully shift his long-term trajectory into an much more constructive course than earlier than:

Coming into 2026, in the ZiPS seasonal simulations wherein Judge ended up with 300 or fewer plate appearances, the Yankees solely had an above-average offense 57.0% of the time, with 92% of the crew’s sub-.500 seasons coming in these simulation runs. But with the up to date projections, the Yankees now venture to have an above-average offense about two-thirds of the time, 67.1%, when Judge misses that many video games. And that’s solely attributable to Rice’s enhancements; if I inform ZiPS to use Rice’s preseason projection, the quantity drops down to 56.9%.

If you’re a fan of one other crew in the AL East, as I’m (Baltimore Orioles), you’ve in all probability been ready for Rice to come crashing again to Earth. Given how he’s hit in 2026, nonetheless, I concern we’ll have to pin our collective hopes on different sources of Yankees misfortune. Ben Rice’s energy is actual and it’s spectacular.