WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Yankees needed only one inning Sunday to produce a month’s worth of offense. They scored 13 runs. They sent 12 straight batters to the plate before an out. The frame lasted 43 minutes and read like a scoring error. And inside that storm of records, one Yankees hitter did something the major leagues had not seen in more than 50 years.
The team total drew most of the attention afterward. The individual record, though, belonged to first baseman Ben Rice.
A Yankees frame unlike anything in recent memory
New York buried the Athletics under a 13-run third inning at Sutter Health Park and went on to win 13-8. All 11 of the Yankees’ hits came in that single inning. They sent 12 hitters to the plate before recording an out.
Rice batted twice in the frame. The first time, he hit a double. The second time, he hit a triple. Between those two extra-base hits, he drove in four runs. The Yankees were scoring in bunches, and Rice was at the center of it.
The record buried inside the chaos
Here is the line that makes Sunday permanent. Rice became the only player in Major League Baseball since at least 1974 to record a double, a triple and four RBI in the same inning. That is more than 50 years without a single matching performance.
It is the kind of statistic that hides in plain sight. The Yankees scored 13 times. Captain Aaron Judge had barked at his team to wake up before the inning. The whole lineup churned through the Athletics’ staff. Rice’s personal mark slipped through largely unnoticed in the moment.
For a player who has spent two months establishing himself among the game’s elite hitters, the record fit the larger story of his season.
Keeping pace with the best in baseball
Ben Rice has been chasing rare company all year. When he hit his 10th home run on April 27, he again pulled even with Judge for the team lead. He laughed off the comparison at the time, saying he did not know how long he could hang with the Yankees captain.
More than a month later, the two remained tied at 17 homers each. Rice has shown no signs of slowing. Through the season’s first two months, he has reinforced the idea that he is a genuine middle-of-the-order force rather than a short-term surprise.
Before Saturday’s 6-4 loss to the Athletics, Rice was batting .303 with a 1.047 OPS. That mark trailed only Houston star Yordan Alvarez for the best in the majors. He had gone 4-for-5 with two doubles and a home run in Friday’s win, then added an RBI walk on Saturday.
Boone has watched the climb, and he summed up Rice with a nickname that has stuck inside the clubhouse.
“That’s Benny Barrels, keeps on doing it,” manager Aaron Boone said. “I thought he had great at-bats in the Kansas City series and continued it there [Friday].”
Through a slump without losing the swing
The path here was not perfectly smooth. Rice cooled off earlier this season, going 11-for-66 with a .567 OPS and four homers across 16 games after he missed four straight contests with a left hand contusion. The Yankees did not panic. They believed his swing decisions and contact quality held up even when the results dipped.
That faith paid off. Rice arrived at the weekend having gone 9-for-14 over his previous three games. Judge, who has watched the 27-year-old develop up close, pointed to habits rather than numbers when asked about the growth.
“Day in and day out, even since he got to the league, he just wants to learn, he wants to get better,” Judge said. “I see him around [Paul Goldschmidt], I see him watching [Cody Bellinger] in the cage, guys in the cage. He’s getting here early doing the little things. You stack that up over the course of a long season, good things are going to happen. It’s been fun to watch his growth from his first game here to where he is now. It’s must-watch TV when he steps up to the plate.”
Joining elite Yankees company
Rice’s individual milestones keep stacking up. His solo home run Friday made him the fifth-fastest Yankee to reach 50 career home runs, getting there in 240 games. The names ahead of him tell a story. Gary Sanchez did it fastest in 161 games, followed by Judge in 174, Joe DiMaggio in 200 and Gleyber Torres in 231.
That list mixes a Hall of Famer, a future Hall of Famer and two former top prospects whose Yankees runs ended differently. Boone sees a hitter still trending upward.
“He’s showing the world he’s a great hitter, he really is,” Boone said. “He’s continued to get better every few months, starting when he first got to the big leagues in ’24 and had some success, had some struggles. His experience is starting to go along with his ability to really hit. It’s leading to a really dangerous hitter in the box.”
Erasing the one hole in his game
Last season, Rice was largely a platoon bat. The Yankees often sat him against left-handers in favor of Goldschmidt. In 2025 he slashed .208/.271/.481 versus southpaws, a clear weak spot next to his .269/.356/.504 line against right-handers.
That gap has closed in 2026. Rice is now hitting .298/.385/.614 with five homers against lefties, nearly matching his production versus right-handers. He has also drawn more walks, lifting his on-base percentage and pushing his overall slash line to .304/.397/.649. Goldschmidt, his mentor at first base, has praised the leap.
“He’s such a smart hitter, and his swing is so good,” Goldschmidt said. “He controls the zone. He really does everything, and it’s fun to watch. He just puts a good [at-bat] on them every time.”
On a day the Yankees rewrote part of the record book as a team, Rice added a record of his own.
Will Rice go beyond 45 homers this season? What do you think?
