What's Going on With Ben Rice?
- E.J. Fagan
- Jul 23
- 2 min read
By E.J. Fagan
July 23, 2025
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NOTE: The following comes from EJ Fagan's substack page and is shared with permission.
Please check out EJ's substack page for more great articles.
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Something weird is going on with Ben Rice. Even before his home run last night, his Statcast page was a thing of beauty:
But his overall batting line is just pretty good: .236/.327/.475, or a .347 wOBA.
According to Statcast, he should be slashing something like an MVP-level .290/.380/.560.
What could be causing the difference? One explanation is batted ball luck. The other is that Statcast is missing something. If the former is true, then the Yankees should be playing Ben Rice every day no matter what. If the latter is true, maybe they should trade him while the metrics are so pretty.
Let’s start by eyeballing it. Here is a scatter plot of all MLB hitters with more than 200 plate appearances in 2025. The y-axis is their wOBA and their x-axis is their predicted wOBA from Statcast. Players below the line are underperforming their xwOBA.
Rice is underperforming his xwOBA by 0.058, the fourth highest in baseball. Only Juan Soto, Bryan Reynolds and Michael Conforto Have been worse.
Overall, I don’t see much of a pattern in these names. They are some brand name hitters and some role players. Some fast and some slow. Another point in the bad luck column.
The error is pretty consistent across the distribution too, suggesting that the xwoba-woba relationship doesn’t break down as you get higher. If anything, high-xwoba players tend to outperform a hair. xwOBA explains about 60% of the variation in wOBA, so there is a lot of room for random error to reduce a player’s wOBA. Another point in the luck column.
Okay, but the gap between xwOBA and wOBA isn’t entirely random. Fast players, for example, tend to outperform it. Rice is a very average runner, so speed isn’t the cause. Let’s try and predict (xwOBA - wOBA) in a basic linear regression using the hitter stats available on Statcast:
Okay, now we might be getting somewhere. If (xwOBA - wOBA) was mostly just random noise and sprint speed, we would expect the t values and r-squared values to be near zero. They aren’t - about 19% of the variation is predicted by this model. Launch speed (exit velocity) and launch angle are the biggest predictors of underperforming xwOBA - higher exit velocities and more ground balls.
We can plug Ben Rice’s numbers into this model. It predicts that Rice’s wOBA should be something like 0.26 lower than his xwOBA, or about half the discrepancy. He’s still getting unlucky, but about half of the underperformance is real.
So I’m going to make a prediction: Ben Rice will have a 0.377 wOBA for the rest of the season, roughly equivalent to George Springer’s .276/.368/.498 batting line. That’s still pretty great, but not quite MVP-level. It’s in the range where a platoon makes a lot more sense than the Statcast page would suggest. It also feels right to me - Rice seems like a really good hitter, but I don’t get the vibe that I’m watching an MVP.
What's going on with Rice? He struggles to hit Major League level left-handed pitching. Boone has given him opportunities too, not tons of them but he's had 71 plate appearances and he's only been able to muster a 90 wRC+/74 OPS with elevated K% and far lower BB% so first off, at this stage in Rice's development -- he is NOT an every day player. He's a platoon player who deserves to play against most right-handed pitchers (not all of them, mind you).
Rice has only logged 152 innings at first base this season for the Yankees and he's caught only 46.2 innings. He's actually playable defensively so that's a plus for him that should open up maximum playing time…
The problem with Rica and other prospects who are called up to play for the yankees is simple. Aaron Boone. He plays rookies sporadically (except Volpe who he had to play regularly when Hal annoited him as the Yankees future shortstop two years ago). So how can a rookie perform when he is playing part-time? Or playing out of position? How can Dominguez perform when told to play left field, a position that he did not play in the minor leagues. Doesnt this manager have a clue that players positions are not interchangeable? Dominiguez is a centerfielder-an excellent one with his speed and arm. Yet Boone plays him in left (and expects him to learn the position immediately) while he…
I had mentioned on several occasions hearing different baseball analysts listing Rice as one of the unluckiest hitters in the game, based on how hard he hits the ball and how often he hits it hard.
I appreciate your further research. I do agree with you, I do not see a right now MVP when I watch Rice and because the Yankees have other good hitters, they can attempt to keep him in the most favorable scenarios.
on the other hand, I do believe another theory is also valid. that is the theory that if Rice was playing more, we would see his hitting get even better. I dont know there is any way to guarantee that, but it do…
I think the biggest issue is that we are not used to any Yankees players, especially a homegrown one whose actual state are worse than what they should be.
I bet if the Yankees knew that Rice would start smashing every ball hard with an exit velocity compatible to Stanton or Judge, I don't think they would've signed Paul Goldschmidt. I think maybe they would've played Cabrera more at 1B in Spring Training, because let's be honest, wherever they put him defensively he has been a very solid glove, and they would've found themselves another 3B instead.
But Rice, like Dominguez, has really been a victim of not necessarily being in the lineup everyday.