by Joe Pantaleo
“I knew I was in trouble during the first inning,” said Vincent Rice. “On one pitch, there was an electric shock up my arm, and I just walked off the mound. I knew.”
Shortly after, Rice — then a senior at Farmingdale High School — received news that all pitchers dread: he had torn his Ulnar Collateral Ligament and would need Tommy John surgery if he wanted to play baseball again.
“It was actually a big game for me too. There was a lot of college scouts coming that day,” he said. Rice was one of the best high school pitchers of his class on Long Island, and he had started to gain some buzz from several local colleges that season.
A few weeks later, Rice would receive the surgery to repair his partially-torn UCL, and he decided to walk-on at Farmingdale State College, a Division III program.
Now a redshirt-sophomore three years later, the trajectory of Rice’s baseball career has taken a drastic shift. This season the 20-year-old made Skyline Conference’s all-second team, but not as a pitcher. He was primarily a designated hitter (due to a hamstring injury he suffered earlier in the season), and last year he played in left field.
In his two seasons with the team, Rice has a .381 batting average with two home runs and 25 RBIs. Last year he was first-team all-conference and a finalist for Axcess Baseball’s Rookie of the Year.
When Rice tried out for the team in the fall of 2016, he decided to go in as both a pitcher and a hitter, calling it “one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.”
“I always viewed myself as a pitcher,” he said. “My dad was the reason I tried out as a hitter. He told me to just try it. I didn’t really swing a bat until tryouts. At that point, I was so focused on pitching.”
After having a stand-out performance at the plate, Farmingdale head coach, Keith Osik, made it clear they would use all of his talents in the upcoming season.
“I don’t know how it happened. I just started hitting better than I ever had in my life,” said Rice. “One of my friends asked me, ‘What do you like better, hitting or pitching?’ I didn’t think I was going to hit in the .400s so I guess I like hitting.”
Rice still pitches for the team but in smaller workloads. This year he pitched eight innings, giving up two earned runs while striking out 14 batters.
Last summer he also led his team, the New York Redbirds, to a championship as the closer. “I like going in for one inning, throwing as hard as I could, and then getting out of there,” he said. Rice closed out their final two championship games with successful saves.
“I’ll always have a special place in my heart for pitching,” he said. “I love being on the mound, I love competing. I love the me vs. you aspect of it.”
Prior to his junior year of high school, Rice hadn’t considered playing college baseball. That changed when he was 16-years-old. Rice hit a growth spurt at the start of his junior year, shooting him up to almost 6-foot-1 by the start of the season.
“I started throwing really hard, like mid 80s and even touching in the 90s,” he said. “At that point I was a cocky kid, thinking I was going to a nice DI school as an eleventh grader throwing 90.”
Rice would suffer a brief setback going into his senior season with Farmingdale High School, spraining his UCL while playing in a summer travel league. After going through the necessary rehab and training during the preceding months, Rice was primed for an impressive senior season.
Rice knew there was something wrong with his arm right away. “The first couple days of practice I felt a bubble in my arm, but I’d always played through it. When I pitched on Thursdays it always hurt, and I couldn’t really move my arm until Sunday.”
At this point, Rice knew he was injured, but figured it wasn’t too severe. “It didn’t hurt as bad as when I sprained it,” he said. “I figured that tearing it would hurt more, but it didn’t.”
This nagging injury turned serious later in the season, in what would be Rice’s final high school game.
“I went to go long-toss in the outfield before the game, and I just couldn’t get loose. Usually, the swelling starts to go away but it wasn’t,” he said.
His arm went numb in the second inning, and Rice left the game to seek immediate medical attention. The next day he got an MRI, and they diagnosed him with a partial tear of his UCL. At that point, he was still unsure if he needed the surgery.
Rice contacted his physical therapist, who ultimately delivered him the news. “He called me and was like, ‘Hey Vin, just wanted to tell you it’s not good news, and we can get you in with Dr. James Andrews soon.”
Andrews is known for repairing the ligaments of professional athletes and has done surgery on numerous pitchers with similar UCL tears. “Once he told me that, I was like, Jesus Christ, I’m going to need Tommy John surgery.”
“He was devastated,” said Michael Lynch, a life-long friend who played baseball with Rice in high school, and currently plays with him at Farmingdale State. “He knew what the injury meant, and he knew the rehab that he’d need to be doing.”
Despite the setback and long recovery, Rice looks at the injury today as a positive point for his career.
“Probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me was going to Farmingdale,” said Rice. “It made me such a better player mentally. I learned a lot about myself and what I was doing wrong because I was always so blinded about just trying to play.”
After an 18 month rehab program, Rice made his way back onto the baseball field with Farmingdale State in the spring of 2017. This time with a new-found role: a slugger.
“I flew under the radar a little bit going into the year so I saw a lot more pitches to hit,” said Rice. “I didn’t have that big pressure on me. I wasn’t coming into the year as the main guy.”
Farmingdale State fell short of a conference title this season, losing back-to-back games to St. Joseph’s and Merchant-Marine. Heading into the tournament as a one-seed, Rice was shocked at how the team played.
“We expected to win the whole thing. And we had our worst day of the year, on the worst possible day of the year to have it,” said Rice. “We had a good group of guys, and this year was different. I had to take more of a leadership role.”
When the team traveled to Florida in March, Rice’s leadership was on full display despite the fact he had just injured his hamstring a few weeks earlier and was yet to be cleared.
“We couldn’t score a run, and [Rice] said, ‘Give me somebody’s jersey, I’m hitting.’ The coach put him in, and he stepped up,” said Lynch. Rice would get a hit that at-bat, and was replaced with a pinch-runner who ended up scoring the winning run for Farmingdale.
“If I have a bad game I can’t be sulking in the dugout,” says Rice. “I have to stay up on my teammates and help them get through the game to make sure we do everything we have to do to win.”
Rice and his teammates are already eager for next season. “We can’t even look at the field right now we’re so upset,” he said. “Every time I drive by it at school I don’t look.”
Even though he still has a chance at getting drafted, Rice is laser-focused on winning the conference. “I’d honestly rather win the Skyline championship than get drafted. I think that’s something that sticks with you for a lifetime,” he said. “I won a championship in high school basketball, and I’m still friends with all of those guys. That team will always be together because we did something unbelievable as a group.”
At this point in his career, Rice is just happy to be playing baseball again. Although getting drafted is unquestionably at the back of his mind, he’s preoccupied with enjoying the game that was almost taken away from him three years ago.
“Not a lot of people understand that when you lose the game like that — for a year-and-a-half — you just wanna play, and it sucks not to be able to,” he said. “That’s why I don’t take the game for granted anymore. I just love playing.”
