Yankees’ Ben Rice finally living up to best-in-baseball metrics

Every now and then last season, Ben Rice would pay a visit to his Baseball Savant page.

“Especially when things were, in terms of luck, not really going my way,” Rice said Tuesday. “I would just check on it.” 

What the Yankees first baseman would find was a lot of red, meaning most of his underlying metrics — like average exit velocity, hard-hit rate and expected batting average and slugging percentage — were among the higher percentiles in the majors.

Of course, that reassurance only went so far when he was not consistently getting the surface-level numbers that his batted-ball data suggested he should be — which placed him among the best hitters in the game, like having the seventh-best hard-hit rate (56.1 percent, tied with Rafael Devers and just ahead of Juan Soto) and boasting the ninth-best average exit velocity (93.3 mph, between Devers and Bobby Witt Jr.).

“I think you can only put so much stock into it, because the reality is the actual performance was not on par with the best players in the league,” Rice said before the Yankees opened a series against the A’s. “It was solid last year, but it wasn’t what the process stuff said it should be or could be or would be. In my eyes, it’s a performance-driven sport. It’s like, let’s keep finding ways to get better. Of course the process looks good, but how can we make it even better? How can we make it so you can get more power, more hits, more walks, fewer strikeouts?”

At least early on this season, the process numbers have lined up with the performance numbers, giving the lefty slugger a chance to end up among the game’s best in both areas.

Rice entered Tuesday batting .370 with an MLB-best 1.380 OPS, four doubles and three home runs. He was averaging an exit velocity of 97.6 mph, which was the second-highest mark among qualified hitters, with a league-leading 77.8 percent hard-hit rate.

“It’s good,” Rice said before offering the usual caution that comes with this time of year. “It’s so early. We always say we’ll evaluate at the end of the year. There’s no point in evaluating it now.”

But everything has been encouraging in terms of Rice looking like he is set to take another step up as the middle-of-the-order bat the Yankees believe he can be — including the fact that he has walked in nine of his 36 plate appearances.

“I think just the consistency of the at-bats every single day and the patience right out of the gate [has stood out],” manager Aaron Boone said. “That’s probably the biggest thing I’ve liked about our offense so far, is the patience, especially this time of year. Guys want to get going, or guys that are off to a little bit of a slow start, you want to get those hits, you start chasing that and then you play into the hands of the pitcher. … Benny’s been really, really good at controlling the strike zone and then when you come in there, he can really hurt you.”

In Rice’s first full season in the big leagues last year, he hit .255 with 26 home runs and a .836 OPS, which ranked 27th among qualified hitters. And yet the Yankees believed he was even better than those numbers indicated because he was hitting into a fair amount of bad luck.

Rice found some validation in those underlying metrics — after coming up through a minor league system in which he was evaluated on those “process-oriented” numbers like hitting the ball hard, he said — but it also helps to see the ball find grass, or a seat.

“There’s always a hole over the fence, so,” Rice said with a grin.

In the small sample size of the early season, Rice was also pulling the ball at a 50 percent clip — notably higher than his 37.7 percent mark last season. But he said that was not by design.

“I never try to do that,” he said. “If I do that, I’m screwed. That’s something that I do naturally. I work more on, at least in my practice, in staying through the middle of the field, because I know in the game, I speed up.”