Ben Rice is having a Brett Gardner kind of season

Millennial Yankees fans Ben Rice. Hell, they love every player from Aaron Judge to Ben Rice to even Ronald Torreyes when he was here but if there is one man who truly stands alone among beloved Bronx Bombers?

That would be Brett Gardner. The OG No. 11. The scrappy outfielder from South Carolina who showed up in New York on account of someone’s injury in 2008 and wound up sticking around for 14 years. He even won a World Series and a Gold Glove along the way and was an All-Star in 2015. And every Yankees fan who remembers Brett Gardner’s speed on the basepaths and in the outfield also recalls, as Al Gore might put it, an inconvenient truth.

Brett Gardner, for all of his strengths, just could not hit as well after the All-Star Break. He hit .245 in the second half of the season compared to .266 in the first. Granted, that isn’t awful, but still a 20-point difference. The best single season example would be his All-Star campaign: Gardner was batting .302 headed into the Midsummer Classic and hit .206 the rest of the way. Such was the case for most of his career.

So, circling back to the beginning, what does Brett Gardner have to do with Ben Rice? Gardner has been unofficially retired since his contract expired after the 2021 season and was never teammates with the slugging first baseman.

But by the numbers? Rice is having a very Gardner-like second half. After batting .279 with 29 home runs and a .971 OPS before the All-Star Game, Rice has hit .174 with five homers and a .604 OPS since. Bad luck is a big part of this thanks to a .220 BABIP, but Rice also isn’t seeing the ball. His whiff rate (Whiff%) as dipped to the 38th percentile after he finished in the 71st last season.

Before anyone loses their cool, though, let’s not hit the panic button. Rice’s career is still young and thus it’s too soon to say he has chronic second half demons. It might be the opposite, in fact. Rice hit .281 after the Break last year compared to .235 before.

Two things can be true. Ben Rice can be in a terrible, awful, no-good, very bad second half slump simply for that reason. He’s slumping. It’s baseball. It happens. It’s too easy to forget this is a sport where a batter failing 70% of the time is often considered greatness.

But on top of that, maybe Rice is slumping because he has had almost no protection in the lineup this summer. Aaron Judge has been out since June. Cody Bellinger was slumping before the All-Star Break and then missed a month with a hamstring right on the cusp of a turnaround. Neither Luis Garcia Jr. nor Heliot Ramos provided the expected buffer beyond streaky Trent Grisham.

And don’t get us started on Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s absolute bust of a 2026 season.

Ben Rice is a better player than what he’s producing now. That’s the most frustrating part. Everyone knows he has MVP potential at his best, even sharing a field with Judge.

Lucky for him, Bellinger’s return should mean getting some better pitches to hit and finishing the season strong.

And if the second-half slump persists? Well, he can always give Gardner a call for support!