Hold The Rice: Goldschmidt Resigns with the Yankees
The impact of the Goldschmidt signing on Ben Rice's value at the catcher position
Paul Goldschmidt signed a one-year deal with the Yankees last night. He doesn’t matter much for 2026 fantasy leagues, but this does have a significant impact on the catcher landscape.
Check out Goldy’s splits last year:
→ vs RHP: .247/.287/.329, 22% K%, .323 xBA, .283 xwOBA
→ vs LHP: .336/.393/.570, 12% K%, .363 xBA, .446 xwOBA
There’s a ton of noise in single-year splits, which is a topic we should explore someday, but there’s something very real here. And, no doubt, the Yankees made this move with the full intention of starting Goldschmidt at first base against left-handed pitching.
Last year, Paul Goldschmidt led off in 32 of the 36 games the Yankees played against a left-handed starter. He made 79 more starts against righties. I don’t think he’ll make nearly that many against righties this year, but no doubt he’s their guy against lefties again this year.
The Yankees did happen to tie for seeing the fourth-fewest left-handed starters in the league last year, so that worked against Goldy, but they’re likely to be closer to that big league average of 42.5 this year.
The story here isn’t about Goldschmidt, it’s about Ben Rice. We’d become pretty confident that Rice (who has catcher eligibility in fantasy leagues) was ready to be the everyday first baseman for the Yankees and, given what you’ll see on his Statcast page, absolutely smash.
This news costs him playing time. And that’s a big deal.
The question is.. how much? The fair expectation is for the Yankees to have around 40 games against left-handed starters next year. And we assume now that Goldschmidt starts all of those.
Rice can play catcher, so that’s good news. And he’s good enough against lefties to get some consideration at DH, but not while Giancarlo Stanton is healthy. So we’re not subtracting 35 starts off of his total or anything crazy, but yeah, we should subtract 15-20 starts. That’s around 70 plate appearances. Rice hit a home run every 20 PAs last year. He’s better against righties than lefties, so you do a little bit of weighting there, but yeah, you’re lowering the projection in a meaningful way for Rice after seeing this news.
It’s nothing crazy. We can still easily see 135 starts for Rice, which is the norm for a true catcher (meaning a guy who doesn’t DH or play another position). But it does bring him to the table well short of the elite playing time guys at the position (Raleigh & Contreras).
Here’s the top eight catchers in ADP since January 1st:
The guys I can see playing 150 games are Raleigh, Contreras, and Agustin Ramirez. So we don’t move Rice down very much, I just think he comfortably falls behind Contreras and maybe even Langeliers, who will for sure DH a bunch for the A’s (which Rice won’t do until the Stanton IL stint happens).
It’s not as big a difference-maker as I thought it might be when I started writing this post, but it’s something to know.