Ben Rice is making the Yankees’ first-base picture look much simpler than anyone expected. Through the first three weeks of the 2026 season, the 26-year-old had hit.362/.500/.745 with a league-leading 241 wRC+ and already cleared the 1-WAR mark.
The power numbers are backed by contact quality that is hard to dismiss. Rice had a.500 BABIP, which is almost certainly too high to last, but his 70.0% hard-hit rate and 96.7 mph average exit velocity still ranked among the best in baseball. His hard-hit rate had jumped from 55.8% in 2025 to 70.0% in the early going of 2026, and only 128 of 11,990 runs of 30 balls in play in 2025 finished with a harder mark.
That is why the projection math has started to bend around him. ZiPS, using StatCast data, estimated Rice at a.318 BABIP before adjusting for home run, walk and strikeout rates, then settled on a projected line of.277/.392/.629 with a 1.021 OPS. That would have trailed only Aaron Judge among qualifiers in 2025, and only Judge and Shohei Ohtani in 2024. In 2019, Christian Yelich, Cody Bellinger and Nelson Cruz were the last non-Cooperstown types to post a better full-season OPS than that.
The hard-hit record is what makes Rice more than a hot start. In 2025, only 17 players reached a 70.0% hard-hit rate at any point, a group that included Ohtani, Judge, Juan Soto, Kyle Schwarber and Manny Machado. Rice was already in that neighborhood last season, when he posted a 55.8% hard-hit rate and finished seventh in baseball, but the early 2026 version has taken it to another level.
The catch is that his.500 BABIP will not hold. The batting average is going to come down, and some of the early-season line will go with it. But the reason Rice matters now is that the underlying shape of the performance still survives the regression test. ZiPS has already shown how much of the Yankees’ offense loss from Aaron Judge’s absence could be softened by better-than-expected production from Rice, and the early results suggest that may have been conservative. For a team that needed another middle-order bat to arrive fast, Rice has already done the part that no projection system can fake.
