While it was the pitching staff that carried the team through the first week of games, the offense began to break out scoring 23 runs in their three-game set against the Marlins. The unit is still far from firing on all cylinders, Aaron Judge yet to truly ignite his season. Instead, they’ve had to rely on the contributions of a different pair of sluggers, Giancarlo Stanton picking up this season where he left off last year while Ben Rice looks poised to break out as the league’s next offensive juggernaut.
We join Rice leading off the bottom of the seventh, the cleanup hitter having already endured an 0-for-3 night with three strikeouts. However, the Yankees are winning, and Rice remains one swing away from transforming a stinker of a night into a productive outing.
The Marlins have brought in a fresh reliever for the seventh, the hard-throwing Michael Petersen hoping for a clean inning. He throws one of the best four-seamers in the game when you combine its velocity and movement, so it’s no surprise to see him start Rice with the ol’ No. 1.
Petersen commands this 97 mph four-seamer almost perfectly to the corner down and away and earns the called strike. Statcast reveals that this pitch is out of the zone, but the Yankees have already exhausted both their ABS challenges, and in truth it’s a good take from Rice given how little you can expect to do with a pitch located that well.
Now that Petersen has shown Rice the high velo cheese, he attempts to get him chasing out in front of a changeup below the zone.
You just aren’t going to get Rice to chase a pitch like this. The changeup is a ball out of Petersen’s hand and never looks like breaking toward the zone, making for an automatic take from one of the most disciplined hitters in the league over the last 12 months.
Perhaps Petersen saw that Rice didn’t even flinch at the last pitch, because he ditches the changeup for the four-seamer for the rest of the AB.
This is a helluva four-seamer at 98 mph with an eye-popping 22 inches of induced vertical break (18 inches is considered elite). Petersen throws one of the ten best four-seamers in the league when measuring vertical movement, this barely dropping from its plane during its path to home plate. It’s such a difficult pitch to track for the hitter — with practically any other four-seamer you expect it to drop into the zone but Petersen’s almost rises as it approaches home. Rice can absolutely be forgiven for chasing and whiffing under this almost gravity-defying pitch.
Just like that, Rice finds himself in a 1-2 hole and on the precipice of donning the dreaded golden sombrero. If Petersen can repeat the pitch he just threw, Rice is almost surely toast.
Wait a second. Rice isn’t supposed to be able to pull this pitch into the second deck just foul after getting beaten badly by an identical four-seamer one pitch prior. This is some kind of adjustment from Rice to be able to immediately doctor his swing plane to match the pitch that just beat him.
After watching Rice clobber that elevated four-seamer into the second deck, you might expect Petersen to go with something off-speed to take advantage of Rice’s sped up bat. Instead he tries to sneak another four-seamer by Rice in the same spot.
Bad idea. In addition to this pitch actually being in the zone, Rice has fully adjusted his swing to do damage, and boy does he, lasering a 111 mph frozen rope into the seats in right for his second home run of the season. That’s two adjustments in the course of three pitches — the mark of a hitter who is not only locked in but also fully understands every facet of his own swing.
Here’s the full AB:
Rice alongside Cam Schlittler has been one of the true developmental wins for the Yankees since Aaron Judge ascended to superstardom. His emergence as a middle-of-the-order bat comes at a crucial time for the Bombers as they suffer through fielding the worst six-through-nine hitters in all of MLB
You always knew Ryan McMahon and José Caballero were apt to struggle offensively, but the lack of production from Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Austin Wells has seriously shortened the lineup in the early going. The onus is therefore on the first five hitters to shoulder the majority of the offensive burden. If Rice can continue his own ascent toward becoming one of the most dangerous first basemen in the league, the Yankees should still continue to score runs irrespective of the impotence of the bottom of their order.
We all know about Rice’s batted ball supremacy — over a quarter of his batted balls have been barreled while almost four out of every five is hard-hit. We also know how he has made himself into a strike zone savant, placing in the 90th percentile or better in walk and chase rates. However, this encounter showcases another pair of skills he has developed in his time in the majors. His ability to make adjustments pitch-to-pitch and AB-to-AB is already elite. But perhaps even more impressive, his mentality to immediately turn the page after experiencing disappointment — as evidenced by his home run and two-run double after striking out in his first three at-bats of this game — is what I believe will take Rice into the stratosphere of MLB hitters.
