The 2025 season is baseball Hall of Famer Jim Rice’s 23rd year as a pregame and postgame analyst on Boston Red Sox telecasts. But this week, he offered what is perhaps his sharpest public criticism yet of the team.
Rice’s comments on Monday came on the heels of an underreported conflict he had during spring training with a member of the Red Sox analytics staff.
“Itâs a strange time in baseball, a sport steeped in tradition, yet changing and modernizing at warp speed in a way that can alter the relationship to prior generations,” wrote Alex Speier in the Boston Globe on March 8. “That tension came to a head in a recent heated disagreement between Hall of Famer Jim Rice and a uniformed Red Sox staffer in the batting cages at JetBlue Park.”
Details of the spat were never made public, although variations in hitting philosophy and approach were largely believed to be at the center of the incident.
âThey donât want my expertise. So what do you do? Keep your mouth shut. You observe,â said Rice at the time. âAnd then when you have a chance to say something, you say it.â
Red Sox ‘Can’t Be Long and Quick’
On Monday, while breaking down Rafael Devers’ swing and early season struggles on NESN, Rice said, “I guess the strategy of the game has changed. It was said, ‘Hit the ball in the air; hit the ball hard.’ But sometimes, you have to think about the situation. They can’t get on top of the ball now because they’re teaching the guys to hit the ball in the air. When a guy is throwing 97, you want to be short and quick. You can’t be long and quick.”
Devers has started the season mired in a record-breaking cold streak, going hitless in his first 19 at-bats with 15 strikeouts. That’s the most strikeouts ever recorded by an MLB player in the first five games of a season. There have been 144 MLB seasons since the founding of the National League in 1876.
The Red Sox have hit just .211 as a team through the season’s first five games. Their slugging percentage sits at a meager .343, and they’ve struck out in 27% of their at-bats.
Rice “is distrustful of how technology and data-driven development has displaced feel for the game and athletic intuition. He believes pulling the ball in the air has been overemphasized, and that hitters should be more versatile and situationally adaptable while hitting line drives to all fields,” according to Speier.
Monday, it seems, was Rice’s chance to finally say something.
The Red Sox play the second game of their three-game series with the Baltimore Orioles Tuesday night at 6:35PM eastern.
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