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For more than a decade, Rice, whose No. 14 will be retired by the club before Tuesday’s home game with Oakland, was one of the most feared hitters in the game, particularly during the three seasons from 1977-79 when he averaged .320 with 620 hits, scored 342 runs and knocked in 383, and hit 124 homers.

“He was the one guy we talked about, not letting him hurt us,’’ says Cecil Cooper, who faced Rice for 11 years with the Milwaukee Brewers after playing alongside him for two full seasons in Boston. “He probably was the guy who got the most conversation, and deservedly so. He wasn’t the prototypical slugger per se, but he’d just mash the ball. He was a monster at the plate.’’

Rice’s raw natural power was legendary. His 1976 bomb off Kansas City’s Steve Busby went over everything next to the Fenway flagpole in center field. It was, reckoned owner Tom Yawkey, “unquestionably the longest ever’’ homer hit there. The previous year in Detroit, Rice broke his bat merely by checking his swing. “Never seen anything like it,’’ marveled catcher Carlton Fisk.

Yet what made Rice remarkable was his power wedded to average. “I wasn’t a home run hitter,’’ he says. “I could hit home runs. My thing was to hit the ball from left-center to right field. Elevate the ball.’’

That’s how he’d done it in high school in Anderson, S.C., where there was no fence in right at Nardin Field. “You had to hit it 9 miles,’’ says Carroll Emery, who coached Rice at Hanna High School. “When Jim came back I told him, ‘You’ve got the green wall there. We’ve got the briar patch at Hanna.’ ’’

Had Rice been a pure pull hitter, he would have had considerably more Monster shots, but that would have changed his game. “Fenway was not a great park for him,’’ says former teammate Fred Lynn. “Jim would hit the ball to right-center a lot, and that’s a big part of the park.’’