Ben Rice Is Laying Waste to the American League

Coming into the season, the ZiPS projections generally saw the Yankees as having lower divisional odds than standings based on other projection systems and methodologies. One of the biggest reasons for that was, paradoxically, one of the best things a baseball team can possess: Aaron Judge with a signed contract. Since ZiPS attempts to simulate the effects of injuries, including season-ending ones, the Yankees offense took an absolutely brutal hit any time Judge was absent. In the system’s current season simulations, that effect has been mitigated somewhat by the improved projections of one man: first baseman Ben Rice.

Judge’s courtroom is a terrifying dystopia in which defendant pitchers find scant justice and almost sure punishment. And while this judge is typically content to handle executions himself, it’s Rice who has been operating the guillotine the most frequently 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 have an OPS nearing 1.300, a good number of things have probably gone your way, certainly more than have gone against you. Rice’s batting average, fourth in baseball among qualifiers, is naturally helped quite a lot by a .500 BABIP, which has yet to prove sustainable at the big league level. But what makes Rice’s season so amazing is that even if you take some of the helium out of his seasonal line, it still tells the story of a batter who might be emerging as one of baseball’s elite offensive talents.

ZiPS has a built-in tool that estimates a player’s line purely from StatCast data, and unsurprisingly, Rice’s BABIP comes down considerably when looking at the advanced data, with that .500 BABIP becoming a mere .318 BABIP. But that’s not enough to take the oomph out of his season-to-date performance, not by a long shot. When you tabulate the ZiPS adjustments for BABIP, as well as his home run, walk, and strikeout rates, Rice’s line still comes out as a robust .277/.392/.629, good for a 1.021 OPS. To put a 1.021 OPS in context, among qualifiers, that would have trailed only Judge in 2025, and only Judge and Shohei Ohtani in 2024. The last time a player who wasn’t obviously headed to Cooperstown had a better OPS in a full season was back in 2019, when Christian Yelich, Cody Bellinger, and Nelson Cruz all managed it.

Of course, Rice is unlikely to be quite this good over the course of a full season. Baseball is a game of adjustment and re-adjustment, and the volatility of players’ small-sample numbers strongly supports the idea of there being significant ebb and flow in their “true talent,” as abstract a concept as that may be. Rice can’t keep up that BABIP, but hitting the ball really hard is a crucial component of extended success for a power hitter. He was hardly a slouch last year, with a 55.8% hard-hit rate (seventh in baseball). But this year, that’s improved to 70.0% in the early going, trailing only Fernando Tatis Jr., and his 96.7 mph average exit velocity ranks fourth in baseball.

Even with just 30 balls in play, a 70% hard-hit rate is hard to achieve. Of the 11,990 runs of 30 balls in play in 2025, only 128 had a hard-hit rate greater than Rice’s 70%. The list of 17 players who managed the feat at any point in 2025 is a who’s who of superstars (Ohtani, Judge, Juan Soto), players with a history of hitting balls very hard (Kyle Schwarber, Manny Machado), and, surprisingly, Michael Harris II. One of the reasons that these types of numbers have proven useful, especially when projecting hitters, is that they don’t display the same level of volatility that the more traditional stats do. And what’s more, Rice has accomplished this while pitchers have shown him greater respect, throwing significantly fewer fastballs, and fewer pitches in the strike zone, than in 2025.

Rice’s trend arrow was already firmly pointing up. A couple of months ago, I ran the numbers to see which players had seen their 2026 forecasts improve the most during the 2025 season. Rice ranked sixth among the hitters in terms of the largest improvement. He was projected for a 128 wRC+ entering this season, but his rest-of-season wRC+ has already jumped to 137. The in-season model is simpler than the full ZiPS model (otherwise it couldn’t run every day), and with StatCast data included, ZiPS now sees Rice as a 143-wRC+ hitter the rest of the way. That’s the seventh-best rest-of-season wRC+ projection in ZiPS.

Running the full ZiPS model for the first three weeks of the season, Rice has had the second-largest bump in projected wRC+ of any hitter in baseball (the biggest change is Jordan Walker’s). As you might expect, that’s been enough to meaningfully shift his long-term trajectory into an even more positive direction than before:

Coming into 2026, in the ZiPS seasonal simulations in which Judge ended up with 300 or fewer plate appearances, the Yankees only had an above-average offense 57.0% of the time, with 92% of the team’s sub-.500 seasons coming in those simulation runs. But with the updated projections, the Yankees now project to have an above-average offense about two-thirds of the time, 67.1%, when Judge misses that many games. And that’s solely attributable to Rice’s improvements; if I tell ZiPS to use Rice’s preseason projection, the number drops down to 56.9%.

If you’re a fan of another team in the AL East, as I am (Baltimore Orioles), you’ve probably been waiting for Rice to come crashing back to Earth. Given how he’s hit in 2026, however, I fear we’ll have to pin our collective hopes on other sources of Yankees misfortune. Ben Rice’s power is real and it is spectacular.