All roads to the big leagues are different, but Ben Rice had to pave his own unique path just to make it to pro ball.
Long before the Yankees called him up Tuesday for his MLB debut, playing first base as Anthony Rizzo’s injury replacement, Rice was a catcher at Dartmouth who played just 30 games in his entire college career.
After playing just 23 games as a freshman, Rice was seven games into his sophomore season in 2020 when COVID-19 cut it short and threw a wrench into his baseball journey. The Ivy League canceled the 2021 baseball season, too, forcing Rice to get creative in how he got scouts’ attention, which included organizing pickup games, playing in a men’s league and taking batting practice with his dad wherever he could all around Massachusetts.
“The whole process, I gotta tell you, was a lot of fun,” Matt Hyde, the Yankees’ Northeast Area scout who signed Rice, said Thursday over the phone.
