Keith Law is one of the most widely respected prospects writers in baseball, and one thing he tries to do is explain why he gets certain players wrong.
In a new article on Thursday, he dove into New York Yankees star Ben Rice, whom he never viewed as a high-ranking prospect.
Of course, Law was not alone in his assessment.
Rice went to Dartmouth, not known as a baseball powerhouse, and he was a 12th-round pick in the 2021 MLB Draft, having missed out on a lot of college baseball because of the COVID-19 pandemic and ending up with just one homer in his college career.
Nothing about Rice’s outward pedigree screamed future star.
But through Sept. 16, Rice has belted 38 home runs and driven in 92 runs in the 2026 MLB season. Clearly, he’s a star.
The 27-year old lefty slugger just wasn’t always seen this way.
What Prospect Rankings Got Wrong
One of the first things that struck Law was that Rice was a catcher who wasn’t going to stay a catcher. That’s always a negative.
Rice also didn’t have an early start in the minor leagues, and so he was always older than most at his level.
“Even when he started producing in the minor leagues, with a 20-homer season across three levels in 2023, he was old for the levels he played at and didn’t have a position — he was a catcher with no shot to stay there,” Law wrote on Thursday. “His swing was extremely uphill, prioritizing power over everything else, and in his first stint in the majors in 2024, pitchers exploited that swing path, leading to his first struggles in pro ball.”
It turns out that Rice kept making the changes and improvements that would help him become a quality big leaguer, though.
“Rice went out that offseason and worked on his swing and his body, gaining enough strength to improve his bat speed and, naturally, his contact quality,” Law writes. “It wasn’t his first rodeo — he’d changed his stance and swing while in college — but this change was more dramatic, with a much more open setup and a stride that didn’t close himself off, helping him roll over to the right side less often and, at least in 2025, pull the ball in the air more. The change also made him less vulnerable on stuff middle-in; in 2024, he whiffed on 25 percent of pitches on the inner third, then cut that to 11.3 percent in 2025 and 11.9 percent so far this year. He’s still not a catcher, but he’s a top-10 bat in the majors this year.”
Keith Law on Cam Schlittler
Law goes on in the same blurb to note that he also never saw Yankees pitching star Cam Schlittler turning out to be this good.
“He barely threw a sinker at all when I saw him, and used it just 6.1 percent of the time in the majors last year, but this year he’s used it 19.6 percent of the time,” Law writes. “Schlittler has thrown something other than one of his three fastballs just 10.6 percent of the time this year. Only Chad Patrick throws fewer non-fastballs among starters with 100+ innings this year; Misiorowski is fourth on the list at 18.3 percent.”
A prospect analyst would want to see more than just a good fastball to be high on a pitcher.
Schlittler’s fastball variety pack has turned out to be so good that he’s hardly needed anything else, a total outlier but a total star.
Expert Explains Why He Got Yankees’ Ben Rice Wrong