Let me take you Behind the Blog™ for a moment. The Defector staff is currently assembled in a top-secret location, and a bunch of us were crammed into Lauren's room to watch the end of Yankees–Red Sox. Ben Rice hit a grand slam in the eighth to make it 9-0 New York, his second homer of the game and to nearly the same part of the park. I mustered all of my formidable wit and floated to the assembled bloggers a potential headline: Ben Twice. Everyone groaned at my shit. Pearls before swine. I'll show them, I vowed. Anyway, that's how you got this headline.
The grand slam was mostly style points; it was Rice's first homer, a solo shot in the fifth inning, that felt like it truly decided the first game of this best-of-three wild card series. Cam Schlittler was dealing for the Yankees; he would finish with six and a third innings of two-hit, 10-strikeout gas. Payton Tolle, Boston's own young and talented arm, was surviving: one run on five hits scattered over his four innings to that point. Tolle recorded two quick outs in the fifth before manager Chad Tracy gave him the hook. It felt like scared managing. Compare to the Yankees letting Schlittler throw a career-high 117 pitches. But Tracy didn't want Rice to get a third look at Tolle's stuff.
“Not just the pitch count necessarily, but you’re trailing already, you’re moving through the third time [through the order],” Tracy said. “Rice had already hit a double in the gap off of him, and you have a nice lane there for Miller, and obviously he got him."
The subject and object aren't quite clear in Tracy's retelling of who got whom, but Rice was the getter, lefty reliever Erik Miller the gotten.
Rice, 27 years old, homegrown, in his second full season, has not waited for Aaron Judge to retire to become the Yankees' best hitter. But he hadn't previously had much to show for it in the postseason. He jumpstarted those totals in a single night. He finished Tuesday 4-for-5 with the two homers and six RBI—postseason highs (not for a single game; for an entire postseason) for him in each of those categories. "If you want to be a legend, which is obviously the goal, you got to do it in the postseason," Schlittler said.
Rice is quieter, more media-trained, so his answer was a little different. Like Schlittler, he grew up in Massachusetts; unlike Schlittler, he grew up a Yankees fan. His favorite part of his monster Game 1? "Getting a W versus the Red Sox," Rice said. "There’s nothing better than that."
Oh, and if you're a fan of Remembering, here are some Guys for you: Rice is only the second Yankee to hit a postseason grand slam against the Red Sox, after Ricky Ledee took Rod Beck deep in 1999.
One game is one game, but it's also a deep hole in a short series. Teams that win the first wild card game are historically 15-1 in their series. The Red Sox won't have to deal with Schlittler tormenting them again. But they will face Max Fried and if necessary Gerrit Cole, part of what is easily the strongest Yankees rotation in a generation. Offense was supposed to be New York's soft spot. Especially with Judge injured, a lot of pressure was always going to fall on Rice to keep the scoreboard operator busy. He's off to a fine start.
