For as often as it is applied with certainty, “Most Valuable Player” can feel uncomfortably inexact. Pitchers are valuable in different ways than hitters. Hitters are more valuable in good times than when they are slumping. Sheer productivity is valuable, but players can help win games in ways statistics obscure. Maybe “Most Valuable” is best explained as “you know it when you see it.”
And in the Yankees’ Game 1 win against the Red Sox on Tuesday night — as on so many nights during the regular season — Ben Rice was the player heaving them over a finish line that was not immediately clear they would cross without him. He went 4-for-5 with two home runs, one of which gave the Yankees a second run when the game was close early, the second of which was a grand slam that allowed them to preserve key arms late. He drove in six of the Yankees’ nine runs while becoming the first Yankee to homer twice in a playoff game in half a decade’s worth of Octobers. He left no doubt.
“Count on one hand,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “One of the best hitters in the league.”
Rice’s regular season will earn him plenty of down-ballot MVP votes, though he almost certainly will not beat out Yordan Alvarez‘s near-Triple Crown season to win it. But if the award were given for sheer offensive productivity, his numbers alone would solidify him as a top-five finish.
Rice posted the fourth-best OPS (.897), fifth-highest wRC+ (149), and tied for the fourth-most home runs (41) in the majors. Only eight players had a higher OPS with runners in scoring position than Rice (.975), who became the focal point of the Yankees’ lineup – and was therefore under more pressure to produce while being pitched more carefully – when Judge was on the injured list for three months this summer.
Built into that three-month period was one month (August, mostly) during which Rice struggled to prop up the lineup in Judge’s absence, hurt further by an injury to Cody Bellinger. He endured a .184 average and .641 OPS in August, and the Yankees’ offense sputtered without him.
“It was a great offensive season, and obviously, we needed it,” Boone said, before recalling that second-half swoon.
“That’s the thing you love to see. For as great a year as he had, he had a stretch there for a month where it was really a grind and a struggle, but he kind of got himself out of it.”
As Rice recovered, the Yankees’ offense followed, and it exploded after Judge returned from his rib injury. And when a strained calf pulled Judge out of action again, Rice slid back into the role of offensive anchor.
The 27-year-old is, and has been, the hitter around whom the Yankees built entire lineup plans this year. Even Judge’s injury made his production so crucial, and even with their catchers enduring historic offensive struggles, the Yankees did not put Rice back in his old position, too desperate for his offense to risk injury or overload from catching duties.
And as Judge, a three-time MVP, tries to work his way back from this injury in time for a potential Division Series, Rice represents the lineup lynchpin once again. Judge has said he will have to be healthy enough to play right field when he returns — not just serve as the designated hitter — because the Yankees lineup functions better with Rice in that spot. Meanwhile, Boone said before Game 1 that Major League Baseball’s active home run leader, Giancarlo Stanton, is effectively on the roster just to take a pinch-hit at-bat each night because getting him more chances would require maneuvering with Rice.
In fact, Rice is one of the Yankees’ few immovable objects. Luis Garcia Jr., whose .831 regular season OPS was 25th among qualified hitters, did not start Tuesday night because the platoon matchup favored Paul Goldschmidt at first base. Rice has been immune to Boone’s otherwise all-inclusive platoon considerations for quite some time.
“He’s one of the best hitters I’ve ever seen,” rookie George Lombard Jr. said. “And he shows why all the time.”
Still, Cam Schlittler was the one who heard MVP chants Tuesday night, and for good reason. He was untouchable, almost literally, for a Red Sox lineup that has seen him many times and planned for this. And when he was asked about those chants, he deferred to another Yankee more deserving of the title.
“We already got an MVP in this locker room. He’s won three of them,” Schlittler said of Judge. “If he were in there this whole season, he’d probably have it.”
But Judge was not in there this whole season — wasn’t even in there for half of it — and despite his best efforts to heal a strained calf in record time, he was not in the Yankees lineup Tuesday, either. Without him, against the kind of left-handed starter seemingly poised to punish the Yankees for the absence of their right-handed superstar, Rice was the unstoppable weapon.
His first-inning double signaled Payton Tolle was vulnerable. His home run against Erik Miller in the fifth gave the Yankees a two-run lead while signaling to the Red Sox that none of their lefties were safe. His bases-loaded single in the seventh gave the Yankees breathing room as Schlittler tired. And it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that his grand slam in the bottom of the eighth might decide the series. Because of that swing, Boone felt safe using John Schreiber in the ninth instead of David Bednar. Because of the size of the lead late, he did not need Brent Headrick, either.
Headrick and Bednar have been the Yankees’ best relievers all season. They will be fully rested in relief of Max Fried in Game 2. With a series win in reach, there might be nothing more valuable than that.
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