Rice, by one measure, has been the unluckiest hitter in MLB this season.
There’s a statistic called Weighted On Base Average, or wOBA. It factors in strikeouts and walks along with batted balls to come up with a number that conceptually can be more telling than batting average or on-base percentage are on their own.
Statcast’s exit velocity, barrel and launch angle data can combine with wOBA for an expected wOBA – or xwOBA. Essentially, what you’d think a player’s wOBA should be based on their batted ball data.
Rice has the largest negative differential between his wOBA (.347) and xwOBA (.406) in all of baseball.
That suggests, essentially, that Rice has been very unlucky.
In spite of that, Rice has had a great season. He has an OPS of .805 and has belted 23 home runs.
His average exit velocity of 93.4 miles per hour ranks in the 96th percentile of MLB, though. His hard-hit percentage of 56.3% is in the 99th percentile.
Those suggest Rice should be putting up even better traditional statistics than he already is.
If anything, it’s super encouraging for the Yankees. Rice has been a crucial component to the lineup this season, and there’s reason to believe his output will only get better as time goes on.
At some point, the luck will turn for Rice, and it’ll be even that much scarier for teams trying to get out the Yankees’ slugger who wears Juan Soto’s old No. 22.
