As the Yankees and Red Sox meet on opposite ends of the American League East standings, neither team can afford to even contemplate where they’d be without the production of their first basemen. For the Yankees, Ben Rice has been the team’s best hitter on the season, and the same can be said of his Boston counterpart, Willson Contreras.
But Rice and Contreras are not just the best hitters for the respective teams. They are both among the best hitters in the American League, and they’ve both gotten to this lofty perch as former catchers that became first basemen.
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While the destination is the same, the journey to get there could not have been any more different for Contreras and Rice. With the Yankees’ ex-backstopper, despite Rice playing about twice as many games behind the plate as first base in the minor leagues, New York decided to use him primarily as a first baseman right as he came up. This was partially due to the team’s needs at that point, but also in an effort to maximize the potential of a player whose primary asset was always his bat. Let’s just say that Rice was never going to establish himself as an elite defender behind the plate, and that he was always going to go as far as his bat took him.
Contreras, on the other hand, was always a fairly flexible player, including featuring in a corner outfield in his first season back in 2016, but managed several years of success and became a two-time All-Star, all behind the plate. It wasn’t until last season, after a couple of years with the Cardinals, that an organization decided to give him an extended look at first. The offensive production for Contreras remained good in 2025, but more importantly, he had his healthiest campaign since 2018, featuring in 135 games, 120 of them at first and an extra 15 as the designated hitter. As a primary catcher, he’d only averaged about 100 games played in his previous five full seasons.
Looking to bolster their lineup following the departure of Rafael Devers, the Red Sox took to the trade market in search of reinforcements and found in the Cardinals a willing trade partner. Boston acquired Contreras to be its primary first baseman, and that individual move could not have turned out better for them, even if the rest of the offense has been a letdown, to say the least. Hitting at Fenway has perfectly suited Contreras (.946 OPS at home), on his way to his best season with the bat since 2019, when he OPS’d .888 and was an All-Star for the Cubs.
Both Rice and Contreras are performing well above the standards they had previously set, and while it’d be foolish to tie all of this progress to the fact they’ve recently been completely removed from the efforts of playing catcher, to ignore its positive effect is equally naive. Either of these teams could feasibly take the aggressive route of trying to, at least occasionally, use one of their best hitters as a catcher, given the dire status of the catching market and their depth chart.
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Yet, they choose not to, and are rewarded with two of the AL’s best hitters. We don’t have the counterfactual of exactly how either Rice or Contreras would be performing right now if they were still occasionally playing catcher, but it’s easy to envision that they wouldn’t be hitting as well, and perhaps not as often. Contreras in particular has been quite durable, appearing in 77 of Boston’s 79 games this year. Without the burden of learning and managing an entire pitching staff, and without the wear and tear that comes with squatting behind the plate for a few hours every night, both Rice and Contreras have been free to be the best versions of themselves at the plate.
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