Bullet point summary by AI
- The New York Yankees have surged to the top of the AL standings thanks to a powerful offensive start from their lineup.
- Two teammates have already matched a historic benchmark set decades ago, joining an elite group with their early-season power display.
- Current production suggests the duo could challenge long-standing franchise records for tandem performance if they maintain their pace.
Another day, another win for the New York Yankees on Monday against the Rangers — and another home run for both Ben Rice and Aaron Judge. They’re now up to 10 and 11 on the season, respectively, and that’s already earned them a place in the franchise record book: According to MLB.com’s Sarah Langs, Rice and Judge are just the second pair of Yankees teammate to reach the double-digit homer mark within the first 29 games of a season. The only other duo to pull it off? Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra back in 1956.
It’s a bit hard to believe, given that this is just Rice’s second full season in the Majors; only 12 months ago, he was former 12th-round pick with question marks about his long-term home defensively. But at this point, it’s increasingly hard to argue with the notion that he’s one of the best hitters in baseball, full stop. And this bat next to Judge’s in New York’s lineup has a chance to make even more Yankees history.
Ben Rice has become a true superstar at the plate
If you’re still skeptical, I get it. Rice has more or less come out of nowhere over the last year or so: He was a 12th-round pick from a cold-weather state, and while he earned a bit of buzz among those deep into the Yankees farm system as he hit his way through the Minors, he was never considered anything remotely like a top-100 prospect. When he posted a .613 OPS across a 50-game MLB debut in 2024, it felt like he was closer to hitting his ceiling as a quad-A player than reaching big-league stardom.
But the top-line numbers during his rookie year masked a very simple fact: Rice hit the ball very, very hard. And he’s continued to do so ever since — first in spring training last year, when he tore the cover off ball, then during the regular season as he slowly but surely stole the first-base job from Paul Goldschmidt, and now again in 2026. If you simply showed someone his Statcast page without a name attached, they’d assume they were looking at Shohei Ohtani; so far this year, Rice ranks in the 99th percentile in barrel rate, average exit velocity and xwOBA, and he ranks in the 100th percentile in hard-hit rate.
That sort of damage on contact usually comes with serious swing-and-miss concerns. The fact that Rice is doing it without presenting any obvious holes in his game — and did the same thing last year as well — suggests that this is very much for real. The league has had a chance to adjust to Rice, but he just keeps on raking. He trails only Yordan Alvarez in most offensive categories, and at this point, it doesn’t feel like a fluke; no matter how hard it is to wrap your head around, that’s the sort of company Rice keeps as a hitter.
Which, if true, gives the Yankees two of the five or 10 best hitters in the entire sport between Rice and Judge (the latter of whom remains No. 1 with a bullet until proven otherwise). And the two of them have a chance to reach some rarefied air in Yankees history.
How high can Aaron Judge and Ben Rice climb on the list of all-time Yankees offensive duos?
Of course, I realize that I’m getting ahead of myself here. Judge and Rice have only started together for about a calendar year now, and with this franchise, at least one World Series ring is considered table stakes. But as they continue to pound big-league pitching — and as the Yankees continue to look like the class of the AL in the early going — it’s worth wondering just where they could rank among the greatest offensive duos the Bronx has ever seen.
The standard to which all other Yankees teammates aspire is, of course, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who spent over a decade together from Gehrig’s rookie year in 1923 to Ruth’s departure in 1935. And while their peaks didn’t quite align, the two were at the height of their respective powers for the Murderers’ Row team in 1927.
- Lou Gehrig, 1927: .373/.474/.765 (220 OPS+), 47 homers, 173 RBI
- Babe Ruth, 1927: .356/.486/.772 (225 OPS+), 60 homers, 165 RBI
Judge currently has a 177 OPS+ and is on pace for 61 homers, while Rice has a 226 OPS+ and is on pace for 45 long balls. Obviously those gaudy RBI totals for Ruth and Gehrig will be hard to match in the run-scoring environment of 2026, but otherwise, we’re not too far off — if Judge reaches the heights he hit in 2024 and 2025, when he posted OPS+ figures of 225 and 214, and Rice keeps up this pace, the two will come pretty close to mirroring their predecessors’ production.
And other than that, I’m not sure there’s a ton of competition. Gehrig overlapped with a young Joe DiMaggio in the late 1930s, but the two combined for a 176 OPS+ and a 166 OPS+, respectively — numbers that, right now, pale in comparison to what Judge and Rice are doing. Even the famed 1961 home-run chase between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris doesn’t quite measure up: The Mick had a 206 OPS+ that year, while Maris, despite eclipsing the Babe’s single-season record, wound up “only” at 167.
Granted, we’re not even out of April yet. Judge and Rice have to keep this up for a whole season for this to even be a topic of conversation. And again, what they do in October matters a lot more than any homers they hit in the spring; that’s just the nature of the beast, especially in comparison to players who brought multiple titles to the Bronx. But if what Rice is doing right now is sustainable — and I can’t really see why it’s not — we could be in for an all-time season.
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