TORONTO — Ben Rice stepped in twice against the Blue Jays on Saturday and crushed a pair of balls that went nowhere.
The first left his bat at 105.4 mph and died in center field. The second carried to the warning track in right and settled into a glove. The Yankees lost 4-1, their third straight defeat, and the first baseman turned designated hitter walked back to the dugout without a hit for the second day in a row.
An All-Star-level first half sits beside a .193 stretch, and the loud contact only deepens the mystery.
Nobody watching Rice square up baseballs at Rogers Centre would have called him overmatched. The contact was loud. The results were empty. That gap has become the defining feature of his summer, and it is starting to reshape how the Yankees think about a lineup already stretched thin without Aaron Judge.
New York fell to 68-55, second in the AL East, six games behind the Tampa Bay Rays. The Yankees managed four hits, all singles, against a Toronto bullpen game. Rookie shortstop George Lombard Jr. drove in the only run. Right-hander Cam Schlittler gave the Yankees 5 1/3 innings of one-run ball and struck out seven, and got nothing for it.
The quiet alarm inside that box score is Rice. For a stretch of the season he looked like one of the best hitters in baseball. Lately he has looked like a different player in the same uniform, and the split has grown too sharp to wave off as a slump.
Two versions of the same season
Rice entered Saturday with the fifth-highest OPS in the American League at .883 and the third-most home runs in the league with 32. Those are MVP numbers, and for much of the first half his name appeared in that conversation.
Then there is the recent Rice. Over his previous 21 games, he was batting .130, 10 hits in 77 at-bats, with a .494 OPS and two home runs. Stretch the window to 46 games and the picture barely improves. He was hitting .193 with a .694 OPS and 10 home runs across that span.
The season line still reads like a breakout. The recent line reads like a crisis. Both are true at once, which is what makes the situation hard for the Yankees to diagnose and hard for Rice to escape.
The decline has tracked the calendar. Rice mashed early, when the lineup around him was healthier and pitchers could not sell out to beat him. As injuries piled up and protection vanished, the production drained away. He now sits in a Yankees order that has been among the worst in the majors since Judge went down.
Why this slump reads differently
Ordinary slumps come with ugly at-bats and weak contact. This one does not. Rice keeps hitting the ball hard and keeps finding gloves, which is why his quality-of-contact numbers stay respectable while the batting average and slugging crater.
That distinction points the debate toward process versus results. If the swing is sound and the exit velocities stay strong, the argument goes, the hits will come. If the decline reflects something deeper, worn mechanics, fatigue, the loss of lineup protection, then waiting is a gamble the Yankees cannot afford with the postseason race tightening.
Manager Aaron Boone has watched the contact and reached for patience. Speaking before Saturday’s loss, he framed Rice’s trouble as a matter of angles rather than effort.
“Definitely been going through it here in the second half,” Boone said. “Just getting under some balls or getting on top of balls. Just got to make sure he gets on a line.”
Rice sees the same hard contact Boone does and refuses to read it as a warning. Asked after the defeat about the dry spell, he leaned on the one thing a hitter can control.
“I’ve felt increasingly good,” Rice said. “Over the last couple series, I feel like the swing has felt good and I’m hitting some balls hard, not getting rewarded for it. Just got to keep going. That’s literally the only thing you can do is just keep going. It’s all you can do in this game.”
A role change hiding in the numbers
There is another layer under the slump. The Yankees acquired Luis Garcia Jr. at the trade deadline, and the move pushed Rice almost exclusively to designated hitter. He passed his season total of games at first base with his 57th appearance at DH, and has played first only a handful of times since.
Rice’s own splits hint the arrangement may not suit him. He has hit .270 with a .561 slugging percentage in 229 plate appearances at first base. As a designated hitter, across 249 plate appearances, he has hit .244 with a .520 slugging percentage. His two worst slumps of the year have both arrived when his defensive reps turned sporadic.
None of that has moved the Yankees to change course. Rice has graded as a poor defender at first, though he has committed just three errors in more than 455 innings there. The club has parked him at DH and left the glove question for later.
What the Yankees decide next
The context around Rice is shifting. Cody Bellinger, sidelined by a hamstring strain, is on track to begin a rehab assignment next week. Giancarlo Stanton, working back from a calf strain, did not travel to Toronto and stayed at Yankee Stadium to continue his running progression, which now includes the bases. Judge continues to recover from a fractured rib.
Each return complicates the math for the Yankees. More healthy bats mean more competition for the DH spot Rice occupies. A resurgent Rice makes those choices easy. The current Rice makes them fraught.
Rice arrived in Toronto still among the AL leaders in OPS and homers, yet his extended slump now overlaps almost perfectly with the team’s offensive collapse.
For now the Yankees are betting on the contact and waiting for the results. Sunday brought no relief, with Toronto ace Dylan Cease and his 2.40 ERA lined up against a Yankees lineup still hunting the version of Rice that carried it. The swing looks fine. The scoreboard does not. Until those two agree, his season will keep telling two stories at once.
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