A position player turned ace reliever only begins to tell the story of the winding road that made Jack Ben-Shoshan a crucial member of the Rice baseball bullpen.
A member of Jose Cruz Jr’s 2021 Rice baseball recruiting class, Jack Ben-Shoshan was viewed as an all-purpose addition to the Owls’ program when he signed. Listed by the Perfect Game recruiting service as a shortstop, second baseman, third baseman and right handed pitcher, there was little doubt the program could find a way to use him. The only question was where.
Ben-Shoshan came to Rice primarily as a position player, riding the momentum of a standout high school career at St. John’s in Houston. There, he posted a .357 career batting average and a .995 OPS, leading his team to the district championship game as a senior. But the transition to college ball didn’t come easy.
He made a strong first impression, doubling in his first collegiate at-bat, a pinch-hit appearance against Texas in Austin. Still, the rest of his freshman season proved more challenging. He finished the year hitting just .115 over 30 appearances, all as a position player.
Health was part of the reason Ben-Shoshan’s contributions to the program had been limited to the batter’s box and the field at that point. His relatively unrefined pitching history was the other. While many players have pitching coaches and do extra work in high school, Ben-Shoshan did not. Everything he knew on the mound came from personal experience.
“I always pitched, but I would call myself more of an infielder who threw,” Ben-Shoshan summarized. “I didn’t really know how to pitch.”
In his eyes, he was a ball of clay, willing to be molded. And when the decision came to pursue pitching full-time, he dove into the study headfirst, trusting pitching coach Parker Bangs’ instruction as if it were gospel. Without previous instruction to weigh against the new information, Ben-Shoshan became a sponge, eager to absorb everything he could.
Ben-Shoshan took to his new responsibilities well enough, showing encouraging signs throughout the fall, but the newly-made pitcher wouldn’t see game action until the following March, beginning the season as one of several pieces in the bullpen working to carve out a role for himself.
From there, the successful outings began to cascade and Ben-Shoshan began to take on a more instrumental role in the program’s pitching plans. The closer role was spoken for — Matthew Linskey was in no danger of losing his job to anyone when it came to that spot — but Ben-Shoshan was just fine settling into a setup position and turned himself into one of the most trusted leverage relivers on the roster.
The first-year pitcher led the team with a 3.20 ERA, outdoing both Linskey and staff ace Parker Smith, who would go on to be MLB Draft selections following the conclusion of the season. Not draft eligible yet, Ben-Shoshan hoped to join them in a year’s time but life had other plans.
A Pitching Wilderness
All the momentum and goodwill Ben-Shoshan had accumulated during his sophomore season came to a screeching halt when his junior season began.
In the season opener, Ben-Shoshan ceded the game-winning run in his first appearance against Notre Dame. He entered another game against the Irish two days later only to give up a first-pitch home run and back-to-back four-pitch walks before being pulled.
Ben-Shoshan failed to complete a full inning of work in four of his next five appearances, spiraling further and further from his aspirations and seeing his season-long ERA climb to 13.50 before the coaching staff had seemingly seen enough.
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Following a four-run, no-out misadventure against Tulane on March 22, Ben-Shoshan made just four further appearances in the final two months of the season. Davion Hickson ascended to closer status while Ben-Shoshan was remitted to the bench, an arm reserved for blowouts and eating innings in games decided long before he was summoned to the mound.
A season that began with such promise had ended in disaster.
Ben-Shoshan, whose Rice baseball career had been anything but linear to that point, resolved not to let that bad year define him. He spent the summer working at the Driveline facility in Washington, an organization that prides itself on utilizing technology and analytics to improve performance. His goal was to get his mechanics back to where he’d been the previous season.
“I told myself I’m not going to let a year like that happen again. It’s a personal thing that I took,” he said. “I had a good fall last year and then it kind of fell apart during the season. I pretty much did whatever I could to not let that happen again.”
From his perspective, he’d been pressing too much. That search for added velocity had negatively impacted his command. When that went sideways, his confidence and composure on the mound followed suit. Given an offseason to reset, he returned to South Main ready to contribute.
At that point, though, he was an older arm that looked to have lost a step the season prior amidst a bullpen with more promising young pieces. The coaching staff collectively told him they envisioned him as a reserve reliever who might throw 20 or 30 innings in the season. In their eyes, the days of Ben-Shoshan being a high-leverage option were long gone.
The Road Back
Sure enough, Ben-Shoshan made four appearances in the first month of the season including a no-out, five-run debacle against a ranked Mississippi State squad. But when head coach Jose Cruz Jr. was fired in mid-March, Ben-Shoshan saw an opportunity for one final chance to make his case under the leadership of newly installed head man David Pierce.
Ben-Shoshan remembers it being right around that point in the year when he’d truly begun to settle into his routine. His velocity was where he wanted it to be and his command had returned, too. Most importantly, he was as mentally locked in as he could recall being in a long time. For him, the coaching change came at just the right time.
“[Pierce] came in and harped on working the strike zone, getting ahead early,” Ben-Shoshan recalled. “I think that’s something that I’m really good at. He really liked that part of me, filling up the zone.”
Flush with newfound confidence, Ben-Shoshan did just that. He did not allow an earned run in his first four outings under Pierce, including a marvelous nine-strikeout, 3.2-inning relief outing against Sam Houston. All of a sudden, Ben-Shoshan was back in his groove.
Since Pierce was hired, Ben-Shoshan owns a 2.41 ERA and his season-long ERA of 3.51 is the best on the team, narrowly edging out staff ace Davion Hickson’s 3.70 mark. Among Rice pitchers who have appeared in at least five games, none boast a lower WHIP (walks plus hits per innings pitched) than he does. Put simply, he’s been the most reliable arm on the roster for the better part of two months.
It’s not as if Pierce entered with hopes of authoring Ben-Shoshan’s comeback story. He was hired to win baseball games, something that, in his estimation, requires a certain kind of fearlessness that Ben-Shoshan has developed through the trials along his path.
Pierce praised Ben-Shoshan as having a “bulldog mentality. Where he’s like, here’s my stuff, I’m coming at you. If you hit it, I’m going to do it again.”
“He’s not afraid of an at bat,” Pierce continued. “That’s the key, trusting his stuff. He knows he’s going to get popped a little bit, but he never backs down. And that’s impressive to me. That’s what I want from our pitchers. If you don’t believe in your stuff in the zone, then why should we believe in it? And he believes in his stuff.”
Given how unceremoniously his 2024 season ended and this campaign began, Ben-Shoshan’s reemergence represents perhaps the most stark turnaround of any singular player on the roster.
When asked to reflect on his bounce-back year, Ben-Shoshan couldn’t help but crack a smile.
“I’m not surprised,” he said.
“Starting at that Yale game, my confidence just kept going and going and I realized I was in a really good spot, to just keep working through that with that mentality and those mechanics and I didn’t need to change anything mentally of physically.”
The Journey Ahead
Ben-Shoshan credits his pitching success in large part to pitching coach Parker Bangs who has been with the program all three seasons Ben-Shoshan has been pitching for the Owls. It was Bangs who was briefly named the interim coach for the week between Cruz and Pierce trading places and Bangs who gave Ben-Shoshan the opportunity against Yale he credits as the beginning of his turnaround.
“We click,” Ben-Shoshan said of Bangs. “He understands how to coach me and how to motivate me, what kind of feedback I work well with. I would credit a significant portion of my pitching to him. I think he’s been unbelievable in helping me.”
The coordination between Pierce — who comes to Rice with an extensive history as a pitching coach — and Bangs has allowed Ben-Shoshan to thrive.
“When I’m on the mound, I know I’ve got two coaches who have my back and are going to help me if I need anything. I think it’s just a confidence boost when I’m up there,” Ben-Shoshan said. “I can trust myself. I can trust the guys behind me. I can trust the coaches. That’s been a big, big change that I really enjoy.”
To that extent, Ben-Shoshan’s emergence is a testament to the level to which mindset and confidence are essential to pitch at a high level. There was no ah-ha moment, new pitch or refined windup that restored the Owls’ 6-foot right-hander to prominence. No, it was his mind that needed to be readjusted. That, and plenty of hard work to turn those dreams into tangible results.
“I think it’s a mental thing,” Ben-Shoshan said. “I spent the whole summer trying to get my mechanics back to what they were and once I got comfortable with them, kind of just not changing them and trying to do more.”
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Back in his sweet spot, Ben-Shoshan is doing all he can to take it one pitch a time. He admits he at least briefly entertained the notion of going pro and thoughts of the MLB Draft and potential opportunities he might have after the season, but at the end of the day, focusing on the present is the best thing he can do to bolster his chances of future success.
“I’m hesitant to think about what comes after this because part of me thought about that last fall, and I think it hurt me,” Ben-Shoshan said. “For most of this season it’s just been living in the moment, trying to keep stringing good outings together and then, you know, if it happens, it happens.”
“If I can keep playing, I would love to, but at the same time I don’t want to get bogged down on that and affect how I pitch.”
And so he’ll continue to take the baseball whenever he’s asked, soaking in his situation and reflecting on the winding road he took to get here. The future, he hopes, will sort itself. For now, Jack Ben-Shoshan is living in the present and doing all he can to get one more out for his team, one at bat at a time.
**Photo credit: Maria Lysaker**
