Rice Guy’s Twinnish Blasts

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.”