He once wrote 'Yankees rule' on the Pesky Pole. Now he's mashing for them

It seems like Ben Rice was born for this.

As a Massachusetts boy surrounded by Red Sox fans, he was no Fenway fanatic but, rather, a disciple of Derek Jeter. No. 2 was his No. 1, giving him a passion for the pinstripes. That made for some awkward encounters in New England back in the day. But now it’s made for a storybook start to this 2025 season, in which the 26-year-old Rice has provided sweet, slugging salvation to a Yankees team in need.

But Rice’s story is not so straightforward.

His is an underdog tale. He went from the Ivy League to the big leagues – a leap that, while not unprecedented, was still pretty big, especially with a large chunk of his college career wiped out by the pandemic. The scouting that brought Rice into the professional ranks was based not in analytics but in eyeballs – ones that watched him rake in makeshift games that Rice himself had actually helped organize.

Throw in a childhood athletic experience oriented more around the ice than the diamond, and it’s crazy that Rice is here, bashing baseballs for his beloved Bronx Bombers.

“I don’t think I’ve taken that many moments to really look around and let it sink in,” he says. “But it is special to think about it. It’s kind of like full circle, honestly, for me to grow up rooting for the team and to be playing for ‘em.”

Game after game, hit after hit, the Yankees sure are glad Rice is here. Because in overcoming the odds, he’s helped them overcome the absence of one of the game’s biggest bats.

Giancarlo Stanton has been out with dual elbow issues, making it unclear how the Yankees would fill the DH duties. They went into the spring exhibition season looking for some kind of sustenance.

They found it in a big bowl of Rice.

With his quick left-handed stroke, he’s produced one of the highest hard-hit percentages and average exit velocities in MLB. Through 22 games, he ranks in the top 10 in all of MLB with a .603 slugging percentage and 1.005 OPS. He’s already logged 10 extra-base hits.

It took Rice all of five games to convince manager Aaron Boone to start penciling him into the leadoff spot. And when a hit by pitch on the left elbow last weekend threatened to prematurely end his awesome April, he was out of the starting lineup for just two days, only to return to the leadoff spot Tuesday and go deep on the first pitch of the game.

“He rakes, dude,” manager Aaron Boone says. “He absolutely rakes.”

Rice’s folk hero feats have had people wondering: Where did this guy come from?

Well, that’s a funny story.

One day, a little boy from Cohasset, Mass., visited the home of the Red Sox and made his mark.

“We did a little tour of Fenway Park, and when we went over to the Pesky Pole, I wrote ‘Yankees Rule’ on the Pesky Pole,” he says with a laugh. “So probably one of the very few, if any, pro-Yankees writing on there.”

Little Ben’s Pesky prank was part of a larger childhood obsession with the Yankees.

“I mean, you definitely stick out a little bit when you're wearing your Yankees gear around, maybe on my first-grade picture day, like when I wore a Yankees jersey,” he says. “But yeah, it was just because I liked the team that won the most, and I liked Derek Jeter.”

But for much of his youth, Rice’s first love was playing hockey. The sport skates through his blood. His mom, Sophie, was a figure skater turned hockey player. To this day, she still competes in a women’s hockey league.

Ben himself played hockey at a private high school that has sent many players to the NHL. He played on the varsity team as a freshman. But as his high school career developed, he began to veer toward baseball, where he was getting more attention from college coaches.

Rice’s prospects for playing at a high-level Division I baseball program were slim. But he was an excellent student, and he decided to pursue both a psychology degree and a collegiate baseball career at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he served as a catcher. The Ivy League school had produced a few dozen Major Leaguers: a couple All-Stars in catcher Brad Ausmus, who now serves on the Yankees’ coaching staff, and pitcher Mike Remlinger, as well as 1978 World Series champion Jim Beattie, who got the win in Game 5 of the Yankees’ triumph.

Still, Dartmouth is not where you go to be seen by baseball scouts. And when the COVID-19 pandemic wiped away Rice’s junior and senior seasons, it could have wiped away any chance he had at signing a professional contract.

But Rice caught a bit of a break.

The Futures Collegiate Baseball League, a wood-bat league in New England, went through with its 2020 summer season, even as the more prestigious Cape Cod League was canceled. That meant a lot of legit prospects, including potential first-round picks, played in the Futures League, with the scouts trailing right behind them. And when Rice lit up the league that summer, earning MVP honors and shining in the home run derbies that would be used to settle tie games, he began to get attention.

A Yankees Northeast area scout named Matt Hyde took a particular interest in Rice. And that fall, when Rice and his Ivy League friends organized pickup games at a complex outside of Boston, Hyde followed along. He continued scouting Rice the following spring, when the Dartmouth season was again scrapped and Rice resorted to taking batting practice with his dad and even playing in a men’s league against guys in their 30s and 40s.

What Hyde saw -- and heard -- was the ball booming off Rice’s bat. Rice had taken yoga classes to improve his mobility behind the plate, but it was his performance at the plate – that special sound of a barreled-up baseball -- that compelled the Yankees to take a flier on him in the 12th round of the 2021 Draft.

“It’s a weird thing to say, but all the things that my teammates and I did in response to how COVID kind of upended those two seasons was really beneficial,” Rice says. “In a normal fall at Dartmouth, I'm probably not getting really any exposure to scouts. They're not really coming to watch our practices or any workouts. So when I was able to get all those scouts to come and watch in fall of 2020 or playing these random scrimmages and doing these pro style workouts, that was something I never would have had.”

Rice has always hit the ball hard. And in the course of his pro career, he’s learned to swing the bat smart. That combination has unlocked his potential. And after spending this past offseason bulking up on chicken and, yes, rice, he has turned this 2025 season into his big league breakout.

If Rice’s run continues and Stanton, who took BP on the field with the team in Cleveland this week, makes it back from the elbow issues, the Yankees are going to have some decisions to make at DH. Rice can play first base, and the Yankees believe he could handle some reps at catcher, too.

All we know is that if he keeps hitting like this, the kid who once wrote “Yankees Rule” on a Fenway Park foul pole is going to keep getting his name written into the top of the Bronx Bombers’ lineup.