The Yankees limp home from a disappointing finish to their West Coast trip, losing a series to the Padres as the offense went quiet for long spells across the three games. Luckily, they will have a certain Aaron Judge available to play when they return home to the Bronx, the captain returning for the first time in over three months from a broken rib. Before we look ahead to his return, let’s award one last At-Bat of the Week of the 2026 season’s Judge-less era to Austin Wells for his heroics to win the series against the Angels.
We join Wells with two outs in the top of the tenth, the score knotted at one apiece. He didn’t even start the game, but entered in the eighth as a pinch-hitter and successfully adjusted his sights with a single. He now bats in the highest leverage spot of the game. The bases are loaded thanks to a José Caballero single and Jazz Chisholm Jr. walk, but a Luis García Jr. infield fly puts them one out away from squandering this golden opportunity.
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The hard-throwing reliever Luke Murphy starts this encounter off with a perfect back door cutter for a called strike.
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This is just an unfair pitch to start the AB, beginning as a ball outside before cutting back toward the plate and painting the outside edge of the zone. Wells is likely geared up for the upper-90s four-seamer that runs away from a left-handed batter, so it’s easy to give up on a pitch that looks like a ball away out of the pitcher’s hand.
Next, Murphy tries to locate a four-seamer up and under Wells’ hands.
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Luckily for Wells, Murphy overthrows this pitch as he reaches back for 98 mph and yanks it below the zone for an automatic take, ball one.
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Having displayed far better command to the top of the zone with the cutter, Murphy now targets the same location he failed to hit with the previous four-seamer.
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Once again, Murphy is inch-perfect to his target, nailing the corner up and in with this 91 mph cutter. There’s not a left-handed batter in the league who is doing damage with this pitch — Wells is just lucky that the foul pop up leaves the field of play to give him another shot.
I’m a little surprised that after two immaculately executed cutters and one poorly executed four-seamers, Murphy once again switches to the four-seamer.
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This time he is able to execute to his spot on the corner up and away. Wells gets off a good swing, slashing it foul the other way to stay alive.
Now that he’s got the feel for his four-seamer, Murphy tries to climb the ladder a rung higher than the one he just threw.
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He achieves just that, but at 95 mph Wells has a fraction more time to again fight it off foul. While these are two more than decent pitches, the one thing you could say is that by pitching Wells up and away instead of up and in, it gives Wells the chance to extend his arms and hit it foul — a chance he gladly accepts to extend the AB.
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Murphy goes for the trifecta with his third straight four-seamer to that same spot up and away.
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This heater is a little lower and catches a little more plate than the previous two, and that’s all Wells needs to pull it through the hole between the first and second baseman for the go-ahead two-run single.
Here’s the full AB:
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Courtesy of Baseball Savant
Wells was one of the worst qualified hitters in baseball through the first few months of the season, but amid the rumors of the Yankees shopping for a catcher as the Trade Deadline approached he turned his season around. The deadline came and went without backstop reinforcements. and the faith they placed in Wells appears well-founded as he’s got a .781 OPS and 119 wRC+ over the last two months.
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This AB encapsulates a lot of the subtle changes that have catalyzed this rediscovery of form at the plate. Wells doesn’t look overmatched by the velocity or height of any of these pitches when for much of the first half of the season it looked like he’d never catch up to a fastball above 95 mph nor one located belt-high and up. It might be cliché and oversimplified but Wells just looks more “hitter-ish” at the plate — there’s no flinch in his takes whereas he looked like he wanted to chase everything in May and June. There’s conviction in his swing decisions but also flexibility in his approach — I love the way he stays behind those two foul balls immediately preceding the single, going with an opposite-field approach as the location of the pitch dictates rather that blindly trying to pull everything. Finally and most importantly, Wells recognized his barrel was underneath those two foul balls, so he made the mid-AB adjustment that allowed him to raise his swing path to the elevated heater. It’s these kind of mechanical adjustments both month-to-month and pitch-to-pitch that make me confident that this productive version of Wells is here to stay.
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