To paraphrase fictional governor Rob Ritchie, Austin Wells…boy, I don’t know.¹

After two seasons of combining elite defense with a solid bat, the Yankees backstop has fallen into an abyss of offensive ineptitude in 2026, posting one of the worst seasons at the plate in recent franchise history. This collapse would be confounding enough in its own right but is even more bizarre considering the expectations the former first round pick garnered as a prospect.

The Yankees thought they were drafting Kyle Schwarber. This year, they have gotten Jeff Mathis.

Fortunately for Wells and the Yankees, his pitch framing skills appear to be intact, and he has been hitting much better since the all-star break. Still, few hitters in 2026 have done worse. Wells is hitting .173/.273/.299²  and only Logan O’Hoppe has a lower on-base plus slugging percentage; after adjusting offensive output for park and league context, he has been the game’s fourth-worst hitter (minimum 250 plate appearances).

Only six Yankees this century have come to the plate at least 250 times in a season and been less productive.

To his credit, we have two seasons worth of evidence that Wells is better than this. In 2024 and 2025, Wells combined to slash .224/.298/.417 (100 wRC+). It’s not going to make anyone forget about Mike Piazza, but it is better overall than the average catcher over this span, and when combined with his excellent pitch framing, it made Wells one of the more valuable players at his position.

From bat-only to glove-first (to glove-only?)

This superlative defense and the hit tool which has ranged from solid (if not spectacular) to terrible flies in the face of prospect scouting reports which lauded Wells’ bat but questioned his ability to even play catcher in the first place, let alone do so at a high level.

From the 2021 Baseball Prospectus Annual: “...the Yankees couldn’t pass on Wells and his offensive promise. There’s a real chance he’s going to have to move out from behind the plate in due time, perhaps before he catches a big-league pitch, yet the hope is that he’ll have the stick to stand in left field or possibly first base.”

From the same publication the following year: “The Yankees have drafted five first-round catchers in their history, but only Thurman Munson ever reached the majors. In his first pro season, Austin Wells looks poised to become the second, though the bigger question might be whether he's still a catcher when he gets there.”

This is not to pick on BP, as these statements represented the industry consensus. Still, it is wild to read them in light of the player Wells has become, especially the one we have seen four months into 2026.

How did we get here?

While Wells’ offensive metrics have fluctuated pretty wildly, the graphic above shows that elite defensive value has been a constant. As for most catchers, the bulk of this value stems from an elite ability to frame pitches and steal strikes for his pitchers; since 2024, only Patrick Bailey and Alejandro Kirk have provided more framing value, per Statcast’s accounting.

The work Wells has put in with catching coordinator Tanner Swanson, who has more than earned his paycheck since joining the Yankees in 2020,³ has been well documented, and while the results are certainly surprising given Wells’ reputation as a prospect, I’d argue his journey with his bat has been more mysterious.

The metrics actually complicate the idea that his offensive collapse began this season, as his underlying numbers last season were actually worse.

Bad results on batted balls

When we are dealing with a batting average that starts with a “1” and an OPS that starts with a “5,” it admittedly feels cheap to be talking about bad luck, but we are also dealing with a hitter running a .209 batting average on balls in play in 2026 (lower than what big league pitchers posted in the last year before the universal DH), so it is a part of the story here.⁴

We can compare wOBA and xwOBA to get a sense of how divorced Wells’ results have been from the underlying quality of his plate appearances; wOBA is a proxy for overall offensive production (on a per plate appearance level; you can think of it is as a more sophisticated OPS if you are unfamiliar with it) and xwOBA is a measure of what a hitter’s wOBA “should have been” by using Statcast measures of batted ball quality (so the hitter gets credit for a scalding line drive up the middle, even if the shortstop makes a diving catch; it also uses a player’s sprint speed for certain batted balls).

As we can see in the graph above, Wells’ xwOBA (.303) is in the 26th percentile this year -- not good, but considerably better than his actual wOBA (.258), which is tied for third-worst in the sport. Few hitters have a bigger gap between their expected and actual production this year, as he ranks 441st among the 459 players with at least 250 plate appearances in terms of wOBA minus xwOBA.

This gap has actually been worth about a full win. Had his batted balls fallen for hits at the expected rate, Wells would go from 0.4 fWAR to about 1.4, which would put him in the top 16 among catchers this season.⁵

Struggles in the strike zone

Unfortunately for Wells and the Yankees, his failure to turn quality contact into quality results⁶ is only part of the story.

Wells has gotten his walk rate back to the elevated level it was in his rookie campaign after a noticeable decline in 2025, but the poor strikeout rate that reared its head last year has continued to climb. He is running a better-than-average chase rate in 2026, but has coupled this with a big drop in swings in the zone.

While his lack of power production owes much to the aforementioned lack of batted ball luck,⁷ the fact he is passing up on pitches he could do damage on is not helping matters.

Making matters worse is that in addition to taking more strikes, Wells is failing to connect when he does pull the trigger on pitches in the zone; he is tied for 216th in zone contact rate (out of 246 players with at least 250 plate appearances).

If we drill down even further, we can see that this issue is most pronounced on breaking and offspeed pitches, as his whiff rate on fastballs in the zone has actually improved.

Why?

So we now have a pretty decent idea of what has gone wrong for Wells: a disconnect between contact quality and production, and a lack of contact in the zone (thanks to an increase in both passivity and swings and misses).

While we have a decent idea of the what, the why is less clear.

The ball in play issue is the simplest and one we can be most confident in seeing improve; outlier BABIPs nearly always regress towards the mean and there is nothing in Wells’ quality of contact profile that would suggest he is any different.⁸

The contact issue is much less prone to the variance inherent in batted ball results, implying something beyond randomness is at play. That said, it is not obvious what that something is, and a change in approach does not appear to be the answer. Wells’ average swing length is virtually unchanged from last season and his average swing speed has actually come down (harder swings tend to lead to more whiffs, so all things being equal, we’d expect his whiff rate to move in the other direction). 

Health could very well be the culprit here, as Wells had a stint on the injured list in June due to cervical headaches. It is not implausible that this impacted his reaction time, his ability to see pitches as cleanly as necessary, or something else related to putting the bat on the ball.

Michael Zeno of Pinstripe Alley wrote about this hypothesis, noting that the worst stretch of Wells’ season occurred in the weeks leading up to his IL stint and draws comparisons to Anthony Rizzo’s struggles following his concussion in 2023.

The good news for Wells is that his pitch framing skills significantly lower the threshold of what is needed from his bat. His defense remains good enough that he can be a valuable player with even middling production at the plate.

Imagine telling someone that the night he was drafted.