The Yankees may be down a few sluggers entering the postseason, however, they certainly are equipped with a player capable of picking up some of the slack.<\/p>\n
Ben Rice continued his special season in Wednesday night\u2019s 9-2 win over the Tampa Bay Rays. The 27-year-old clobbered his 40th homer of the season in the first inning and performed an encore with his 41st in the fourth.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a cool milestone,\u201d said Rice about hitting his 40th. \u201cIt\u2019s not something you go into the season really like aiming for. You don\u2019t really know how it\u2019s going to go. But as I was kind of approaching that number, so it was cool to do it tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back in spring training, manager Aaron Boone projected that the slugger would hit 39 homers on the season, allowing for a playful moment between manager and player as he rounded the bases for the 40th time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I said like, \u2018hey, there\u2019s 40 for ya,’\u201d Rice said. \u201cI was joking with him after the 41st one, saying, \u2018Hey, thanks for inspiring me this year.\u2019 But it\u2019s all good fun. I mean, back in spring when he told me that, I knew he was hoping I\u2019d hit 40.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rice\u2019s season slash line sits at .263\/.362\/.537 as the Yanks have needed every bit of production with Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Cody Bellinger all missing significant time this season.<\/p>\n
The first baseman didn\u2019t have any real expectations in mind, however, it\u2019s safe to say his regular season was a huge success.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never really set out like certain numbers or anything like that,\u201d Rice said when asked about his goals entering the year. \u201cBut just tried to focus day by day, just trying to do the best I can to stick with my approach and go out hit the ball hard and have good at bats, and then as the season gets closer to ending, see where you\u2019re at and hopefully there\u2019s something like what we did today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rice will have an opportunity to continue his strong season into the playoffs and the Yanks have a lot riding on the power hitter.<\/p>\n
In 2025, he didn\u2019t have much success, slashing .222\/.286\/.273 in six games between the Wild Card series and ALDS.<\/p>\n
With Judge\u2019s status very much up in the air, they will need Rice\u2019s postseason to look much more similar to his regular season if they want to make it a memorable run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Yankees may be down a few sluggers entering the postseason, however, they certainly are equipped with a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":813061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2377],"tags":[5,731,2335,4,297,2550,68,2551,2549,142],"class_list":["post-813060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa-bay-rays","tag-baseball","tag-ben-rice","tag-home-run","tag-mlb","tag-rays","tag-tampa-bay","tag-tampa-bay-rays","tag-tampabay","tag-tampabayrays","tag-yankees"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/117325934316683899","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/813061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}