Rice on Rice

A Father, a Son and a Special Home Run Derby

Welcome to Coffey Grounds. This post is free to all, but if you enjoy it and want to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thanks very much.

Dan Rice is a partner in a law firm in Hingham, Mass. He specializes in employment disputes. For three decades he has handled cases involving whistleblowers, age discrimination, sexual harassment, unpaid commissions, among many others, but he will not be taking on any of them this Monday.

He has a commitment to be in Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, where his job will not involve advocating for beleaguered employees but serving meatballs to his son, Ben, the Yankees’ breakout slugging sensation, in MLB’s Home Run Derby. Dan Rice, who pitched for Brown University in the 1980s, has been throwing batting practice to his son since he was old enough to hold a bat. (We have proof.) This will be a tad different. For one thing, millions of people will be watching. For another, $1 million will be awarded to the winner.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1340348497594008

“That was always a lifelong dream of both of ours,” Ben Rice said earlier this week before he crushed two home runs and had 5 RBI in a much-needed Yankee victory against the Tampa Bay Rays. “So I am really looking forward to it.”

Ben Rice went deep again Friday night against the Washington Nationals in D.C., giving him 29 homers heading into today’s game. It is more than any left-handed hitter in club annals at the All-Star break except Roger Maris, who had 33 homers in 1961. Think about that. Since the first All-Star Game was played in 1933, Ruth, Gehrig, Jackson, Nettles, Mattingly, Giambi, Cano and Martinez — Rice has outhomered all of them through the first half of the season. Rice had a brutal stretch for a time in June, but in the absence of Aaron Judge, the Yankees don’t want to think about where they would be without him.

A 27-year-old with a psychology degree from Dartmouth, Rice has been defying convention, and exceeding expectations, for years. He grew up in Cohasset, Mass., surrounded by Red Sox fans, but his team was the Yankees because his favorite player was Derek Jeter. He hit exactly one home run in his 30-game, COVID-shortened career at Dartmouth. He did well enough in the Cape Cod League and elsewhere to attract attention from scouts, but was never anything approaching a top prospect. The Yankees selected him in the 12th round, No. 363 overall, in the 2021 free-agent draft. It is not the neighborhood that future All-Stars are typically drafted.

In 23 games in his first year in pro ball, Rice, primarily a catcher in those days, hit .197. It wasn’t an auspicious start, but he began showing significant improvement, and by 2023, he hit .327 with 16 homers in Double-A ball. After a hot start in 2024, he was promoted to Triple-A Scranton, belting 12 homers and driving in 33 runs in 30 games, hitting .294 with a 1.088 OPS.

When Yankee first baseman Anthony Rizzo went on the injured list in mid-June 2024, Rice got the call. He made his debut on June 18, drilling a lined single to right off the Orioles’ Albert Suarez for his first hit. The Yankees won, 4-2, and Rice mostly stayed in the lineup, and a couple of weeks later, the Red Sox were in town for a weekend series. Aaron Boone penciled Rice in the leadoff spot. In the bottom of the first, he turned on a 2-2 pitch from Sox starter Josh Winckowski and smoked it into the right-field seats. Four innings later, he drove a pitch from reliever Chase Anderson deep into the right-field seats with two men on, and repeated the feat two innings later. By then, the Stadium crowd wanted Rice to come out for a curtain call, but he wasn’t familiar with it until his teammates forcibly pushed him up the dugout steps to bask in the cheers. He finished the afternoon with seven RBI. No Yankee rookie had ever homered three times in a game.

“The craziest day of my life,” Rice called it.

Rice wound up slumping badly in August, his average dropping to .171, and he was sent back to Scranton. Yankee fans could fairly wonder whether the three-homer game was a cruel tease, but Rice went to work in the offseason, adding ten pounds of muscle and taking a ton of BP with his favorite pitcher, Dan Rice. He showed up in 2025 looking strikingly different, 228 thickly muscled pounds on his 6-2 frame. He finished the season with 26 homers, 65 RBI with a .255 average and an OPS of .836, and has stepped it up in every way this season.

Now he is an All-Star for the first time, and hopes to have a good showing in the Home Run Derby. The pressure is on Dan Rice to throw high-quality meatballs. Fathers throwing BP for their sons is not new. Todd Raleigh threw to his son Cal last year. Vladimir Guerrero Sr. threw to Vlad Jr. in 2023 (Vlad Jr. won, and the Guerreros remain the only father-son combo to win). Jose Cano threw to his son Robinson in 2011. Now it’s Dan Rice’s turn.

If you want to argue that this is evidence of baseball’s unmatched capacity to connect generations, to yank on the heartstrings, well, you won’t get any pushback here. I threw a lot of BP to my son (and daughters), too, and even though Sean Coffey never quite made it to the Home Run Derby, those memories run deep and sweet. One of our best father-son trips took us to Wrigley Field, PNC Park and Great American Ballpark, and a stop at the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa. We walked hand in hand into the corn. (Go ahead and call me corny; you are right.) Dan and Ben Rice will have a different sort of treasured moment Monday night. No matter how many balls Ben hits over the fence, it will be a night they never forget.

“His lifetime pitch count is through the roof at this point,” Ben Rice said. “We’ll keep adding to that total on Monday.”