The New York Yankees lost the Juan Soto arms race, but they won the next battle. The money that would have signed the biggest contract in baseball history instead went to Max Fried and Cody Bellinger, both of whom had excellent seasons in the Bronx. Their cumulative 9.7 fWAR was more than the combination of Soto and any non-Francisco Lindor New York Met. Aaron Judge won another MVP without Soto’s protection, and for the ninth consecutive season, the Yankees were more successful than their cross-town rivals.
But making up for Soto’s absence isn’t a one-year endeavour. New York must pull last year’s act off frequently over the next 14 years, without the guarantee of a Bellinger return.
A large piece of that puzzle is first baseman Ben Rice, whose 2025 breakout made him a fan-favorite and a significant piece of the Yankees’ long-term plans. It’s easy to see why New York is ready to hand him full-time work. Rice hits the ball hard, pulls it in the air, and boasts above-average contact and plate discipline. If you squint hard enough, you can see some Soto in this profile. However, plenty of players have turned in a single season of high-contact, high-power, low-strikeout performance. In a sport built around failure, it’s worth exploring how Rice can lose ground in 2026 and what must go right for him to make good on the hype.
From Pavin Smith to Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Last season, Rice posted 3.0 fWAR on the back of his 133 wRC+, slashing .255/.337/.499 and hitting 26 home runs. Most projection systems are in lockstep, regressing Rice to the mean due to his inexperience and spitting out a wRC+ between 120 and 130. Even our PLV projections, which care little about the box score, are indistinguishable from Steamer in this particular case.
None of that is surprising. Those projections, though, are not ideal for identifying breakouts. They are safe by design, parlaying past results into modest expectations of one’s 50th-percentile outcome. That leaves out some under-the-hood skills that might be better suited for predicting outliers. Pitcher List’s similarity scores examine those tools, comparing players on the basis of contact, power, aggression, and decision value (both in and out of the zone).
Rice’s 2025 season profiles most like 2024 Pavin Smith, 2020 Garrett Cooper, 2024 Vladimir Guerrero Jr., 2023 Mookie Betts, and 2024 Jonathan Aranda. Only Aranda had a worse wRC+ than Rice in his selected season. The rest were excellent, and Rice’s 99th-percentile xwOBA suggests that he was some bounces away from being discussed as a down-ballot MVP candidate. We should consider that his ceiling, operating as Judge’s Robin in a Yankees lineup that desperately needs another star.
This is such a fun tool https://t.co/6Pe98Ny6X4 pic.twitter.com/z87adVY9Dv
— Kyle Bland (@blandalytics) December 3, 2025
That group of names still casts a wide net. If Rice finds himself in Pavin Smith conversations at the end of the year, something will have gone terribly wrong. If he looks like Guerrero at a fraction of the price, New York will likely reclaim the American League East. Examining what each of Rice’s counterparts did in the year following their comparison could help establish the bar for 2026.
Interestingly enough, Aranda is the only player from that dataset to improve in the follow-up campaign, emerging as an All-Star by tapping into his power, making selectively aggressive decisions and adding 1.5 mph to his 90th-percentile exit velocity. His peers were far less fortunate. Cooper was able to tread water while making less contact; Guerrero, Smith, and Betts all saw significant declines. Unsurprisingly, those four all saw sizable losses in their Process+ metrics. Betts had a preseason illness to blame for his power outage. Guerrero didn’t live up to his power potential, either, and Smith completely fell off the map.
| Y+1 Delta | wRC+ | HR/600 | Process+ | Power+ | Contact+ | Decision Value+ |
| Vladimir Guerrero Jr. | -27 | -5.35 | -12 | -11 | 2 | 6 |
| Garrett Cooper | -2 | -5.47 | -10 | 0 | -21 | 1 |
| Pavin Smith | -19 | 4.85 | -30 | -12 | -28 | -7 |
| Mookie Betts | -25 | -11.67 | -22 | -20 | -1 | -5 |
| Jonathan Aranda | 33 | -5.08 | 1 | 11 | -13 | 1 |
It’s a small sample size, and this isn’t a tried-and-true projection system. But Rice’s peers struggled to maintain gains in their power and contact, stress-testing one’s decision value. To Rice’s credit, his 120 Decision Value+ in 2024 was actually better than his 109 mark last season. Both his Power+ and Contact+, meanwhile, improved from his engine-sputtering rookie campaign.
Rice’s 2026 Projections
Looking at the next season’s numbers can also help us project Rice’s statistics. Some soft factors complicate things, like more playing time in a post-Paul Goldschmidt world and a subsequent increase in plate appearances against lefties. Applying the average year-over-year totals and a weighted average (based on total plate appearances across the two seasons) to his 2025 numbers tells a similar story. Like the traditional projection systems, Rice is expected to lose ground offensively, seeing a 1-3% increase in K% and a minor decline in batting average. Our five-man bucket suggests he could lose about five home runs, too. The strikeouts don’t have to be meaningful, although it intuitively falls in line with a decline in projected Z-Contact and Contact Over Expected. You can find the back-of-the-napkin math for that here.
| wRC+ | AVG | HR/600 | K% | BB% | Process+ | Power+ | Contact+ | Decision Value+ | |
| 2025 Ben Rice | 133 | .255 | 29.43 | 18.9 | 9.4 | 139 | 125 | 116 | 109 |
| Average Applied to Rice | 125 | .259 | 24.89 | 22.04 | 10.86 | 124.4 | 118.6 | 103.8 | 108.2 |
| Weighted Average Applied to Rice | 118 | .249 | 23.33 | 20.01 | 10.17 | 124 | 115.3 | 109.4 | 109 |
| Steamer Projections | 125 | .247 | 30.51 | 21.3 | 10.3 | ||||
| PLV Projections | 125* | .246 | 29.42 | 20.3 | 10.6 |
*PLV wRC+ estimated using his projected wOBA (.347) and last season’s park factors. Bellinger’s .347 wOBA resulted in a 125 wRC+ for New York in 2025.
Notably, there is little reason to expect Rice’s underlying power metrics to plummet. None of his peers suffered meaningful losses in terms of 90th-percentile exit velocity or pulled fly ball rate, and on balance, their SEAGER marks remained consistent. Rice isn’t likely to make significantly worse decisions when it comes to swinging at pitches he can drive, and his willingness to pull fly balls is incentivized by Yankee Stadium. Entering his age-27 season, a dip in exit velocity isn’t in the forecast, either.
That seems to make a decreased home run projection a matter of making less contact, not losing potency.
Therein lies Rice’s range of outcomes. Rice carries real downside risk in his contact rates; he could give back some of last year’s improvements, and four of the five comparable profiles regressed by Contact+. Power can prove to be volatile, too, but adds upside to the equation. Aranda’s power took a step forward when his playing time tripled (even though his HR/600 decreased). If Rice runs hot on short-porch home runs, gets some better batted-ball luck, or becomes a little more aggressive in the zone, there’s a world in which he leaves his projected home runs in the dust. At the same time, Rice’s plate discipline and swing decisions should insulate him from the type of regression that hit Smith and Betts in 2025.
New York would be wise to add to their lineup this offseason. Still, in-house development could go a long way, especially at first base. Rice’s similarity scores temper expectations, but with a steady approach and achievable power gains, a second breakout could await in 2026.
Photos by Icon Sports Wire | Graphic by Carlos Leano
