Austin Wells faced and met, head on, the challenge of preparing and executing a game plan for three starting pitchers in his first three games as a big-league catcher.
And then there were less scripted moments, like the ninth inning of Saturday’s game in which the Yankees were clinging on to a 5-4 lead when Clay Holmes entered from the bullpen.
Wells had never caught the closer with a nasty sinker, but calmly handled a heavy dose of them — including a called third strike to end it.
“Kind of thrown into the fire and a high-leverage situation and a hostile environment and made it look pretty easy,” catching coach Tanner Swanson said a day later.
In many ways, though, Wells had been preparing to catch Holmes’ sinker — and other pitches specific to the Yankees’ staff — even before this weekend, despite not being in the same area code as them.
New at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre this season was the high-tech pitching machine that displays any pitcher on the screen and can replicate their pitch shapes.
It is a valuable tool for hitters, but Wells also made use of it for defensive preparation before he got the call to the major leagues.
“[Wells] was really adamant or asking about things that he could do to prepare better for this moment, whenever it was here,” Swanson said. “It’s never the exact same, but I think it certainly closed the gap where the adjustment period was — when he caught his very first sinker [from Holmes], he’s like, ‘Oh, OK, this isn’t completely foreign to me. I’ve seen this before.’ ”
The way Wells caught Holmes’ unpredictable sinkers impressed more than just Swanson.
“Every time I see someone catch Clay Holmes for the first time and he’s making his sinker not look that good and I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ ” Michael King said. “But it’s just, Wells is so good back there that he knew how to handle the staff and called a really good game.”
King, Carlos Rodon and Luis Severino all spoke highly of Wells after throwing to him during the three-game sweep of the Astros.
“It gives me all the confidence in the world to have the guys on the mound be able to trust me right off the bat,” said Wells, who also threw out the only runner who tried to steal on him all weekend on Sunday night.
Every rookie who comes up to the big leagues has his plate full, but that adjustment process is even more involved for a catcher.
But the Yankees tried to make that transition as seamless as possible by mirroring as many things as possible at Triple-A — from advance processes down to making sure the configuration of PitchCom devices were almost identical.
That preparation helped Wells ace his initial test as he became the first Yankees catcher to start all three games of a series this season.
“He’s checked a lot of boxes in terms of just the ability to handle a lot of different things when the stakes are high,” Swanson said. “Obviously it’s a small sample, but there’s been no signs that any of it has been too much to handle.”
