Ben Rice grew up in Cohasset, Massachusetts, twenty miles from Fenway Park, and he was a New York Yankees fan.
Not quietly. He wore the gear to school.
"I mean, you definitely stick out a little bit when you're wearing your Yankees gear around, maybe on my first-grade picture day."
Here is a little kid's entire reasoning, in his own words.
"I liked the team that won the most, and I liked Derek Jeter."
He wore an old school Yankees jacket to games at Fenway. His classmates were Red Sox fans. His whole town was.
And on one of those trips to Fenway with his father, he walked over to the Pesky Pole, the right field foul pole Boston fans treat as a shrine, and wrote two words on it.
Yankees Rule.
He has said he was probably one of the only people ever to write something pro Yankees on that thing.
Now here is what happened to that kid.
He went to Dartmouth. Then COVID cancelled the entire 2020 college season, which for a player trying to get drafted is the worst possible thing at the worst possible time.
So he made his own.
That summer he played in the Futures League, hit .350 with 11 home runs and was named MVP. Then he got his college friends together and organized workouts at a complex in Northborough. His buddies started calling it the Ben Rice League, because that is what it was. A kid ran his own league so scouts would have somewhere to find him.
The next spring he played in an amateur league around Massachusetts where scouts stood in parking lots to watch. He got a few games in at Cotuit on the Cape.
Two Yankees scouts, Matt Hyde and Damon Oppenheimer, found him in the middle of all that.
New York took him in the 12th round in 2021. Not the first. The twelfth.
He reached the big leagues in 2024. And that July, as a rookie, he hit three home runs in one game.
No rookie in the history of the New York Yankees had ever done that. Not Lou Gehrig. Not Joe DiMaggio. Not Mickey Mantle.
It was against the Boston Red Sox.
"I can't believe it was against the Red Sox," he said that night.
This season he hit 41 home runs, the most on the team.
And tonight, Game 1 of the Wild Card Series, Boston again.
Ben Rice went 4 for 5. A double. An RBI single in the seventh. A home run. Then, with two outs in the eighth, a grand slam.
Six runs batted in.
No player in the history of the New York Yankees had ever had six RBI and four hits in one postseason game. Not Babe Ruth. Not Gehrig. Not Mantle. Not Jeter. Not Judge.
New York Yankees 9, Boston Red Sox 0. The Yankees lead the series 1-0.
Now the honest part. The slam came with the game already gone, off a bullpen with nothing left.
But the kid who wrote Yankees Rule on the Pesky Pole went in the 12th round, invented a league to get seen, and has now broken two Yankees records against the Boston Red Sox.
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With a large sea swell forecast I spent the last 2 days out taking photos at the #cliffsofmoher … take a look at this, can’t believe I held the camera steady for so long 💪🏻.
Best watched large and landscape to see all the detail.
Enjoy, and follow for more!
https://t.co/MhuWp7kkns
I’m convinced New York is a social experiment.
New bread store just opened (not a bakery, but a bread store): Rye
I went in to grab a loaf, my friend and I took guesses on how much a loaf would cost
I guessed $25
She guessed $80 based on the interior of the store
$60 for a loaf of bread.
There’s no way people with a fully developed frontal cortex are buying $60 loafs of bread
YOUR NL CENTRAL CHAMPS👏
The Brewers win the NL Central for the fourth straight season and fifth time in the last six seasons.
Can't take it for granted.
Since MLB began tracking Minor League stats in 2005, no player has ever had a season with 100+ RBI, 100+ runs, and 100+ walks.
Andrew Fischer and James Tibbs III BOTH just accomplished this in 2026 👏
(via @azfreedman)
We are going to have a lockout because these owners, who can sell their teams for upwards of $4 Billion, are too poor to pay their players.
It's going to be a horrible winter ahead. Don't you dare let the owners trick you into joining their side.
BREAKING: The Milwaukee Brewers are finalizing a trade that will send Joel Kuhnel to San Diego in exchange for a 1-Day pass to the San Diego Zoo and a $25 gift card to In-N-Out Burger
BREAKING NEWS! THIS JUST IN . .. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: New York just lost 892 companies and $47 Billion in incomes. Oh well, I'm sure Mamdani is still smiling ear to ear, do ya think?