Austin Wells Played Much of the 2026 With a Brain Injury

By EJ Fagan

October 2026

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The following post comes from EJ Fagan's Substack, Baseball Is Life. It is shared with permission.

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The Athletic reported that Austin Wells played much of the 2026 season with severe concussion-like symptoms. It’s a great story, you should read it here.

Wells was hit square in the head by a nasty foul ball on April 23rd at Fenway Park. You can see how hard it gets him on the video. By my eye, more than a normal hit, he loses consciousness or something for a second. The umpire behind him reacts the same way. He then took another nasty foul ball to the face two days later.

Wells says that he passed concussion tests, but still had severe symptoms. He could feel the pressure in his head, had difficulty seeing pitches when hitting and suffered headaches. He eventually went on the IL with a cervical headache on June 6th.

Aaron Boone commented on June 6th that it was the first that he had heard about a problem from Wells. He wasn’t sure if it was a cumulative thing or from a recent injury.

The injury recontextualizes Wells’ 2026 season. Between the second hit and June 6th, he hit .121/.177/.172. He spent the minimum time on the IL and was awful afterwards, hitting .122/.140/.265. It wasn’t until the All Star Break that Wells healed. He got hot out of the gate in July and posted a .787 OPS in his final 56 games.

The whole fact pattern is eerily similar to Anthony Rizzo’s 2023 season. Rizzo suffered a concussion on May 28th, played absolutely abysmally for two months and was then shut down because of a concussion.

Like Wells, Rizzo played through the injury without telling anyone. He toughed it out. And the team suffered because of it.

I get it. Baseball players have to some degree tough it out to get through a 162 game season. Doubly so for catchers. But when you are so injured that you’re hitting .122, you’re not helping the team at all. Ali Sanchez and JC Escarra are way better than a hobbled Austin Wells.

How many of these runs will it take for the Yankees to be proactive about injuries? For a clubhouse culture to change? If the Yankees put Wells on the IL in early May for a month, does he come back hitting like he did after the All Star Break? I bet he does. I bet the Yankees win more games. I bet Austin Wells the human being is less likely to develop long term complications.

If there is a silver lining, it is that we have a real explanation for Wells’ deep slump in the middle of the season. It was very strange to watch someone with so much natural hitting talent play so poorly on one side of the ball. The post-break Austin Wells hit .229/.351/.436 - pretty good, and closely matched to his first few weeks of April by xwOBA! I might expect him to hit for a little more average, but that version of Wells is a top-5 catcher in baseball.

With a caveat, I’m okay with running back Austin Wells for next season. His hitting in 2025 was limited by a nerve injury. We now know that most of his 2026 season was limited by concussion symptoms. I think the dream of Wells’ offense during the second half of 2023, when he was able protection for Aaron Judge, is still alive. And given how good his defense has gotten (I think he’s going to win the 2026 Gold Glove), he still has the potential to be a very valuable player.

Here’s another way to say the same thing. Despite the godawful protracted slump, here is Wells’ Statcast page:

That’s not too bad! You can do worse than 26th percentile xwOBA when the defense is that good. And I’m pretty sure that Statcast underrates Wells on throwing, because the Yankees were one of the best teams in the game at limiting baserunning.

But the caveat is that the Yankees need a better backup for Wells. He needs to rest. He needs to stay healthy. He probably needs a right-handed platoon partner. Ali Sanchez is not nearly good enough. They don’t need to go and pay someone like Ryan Jeffers, but they do need to find someone who isn’t going to be free. I’d love for them to get someone like Carson Kelly from Chicago.