JJ Wetherholt ready to make MLB debut | News, Sports, Jobs

West Virginia’s JJ Wetherholt #27 runs the bases against Xavier during an NCAA baseball game Sunday, March 26, 2023, in Morgantown, W.Va. (AP Photo/Gregory Payan)

MORGANTOWN – Make way, Bill Lee, there’s a new cosmonaut coming to town.

His name is JJ Wetherholt and he’s from Mars, Pennsylvania, but his intergalactic roots are less the reason he’s an aspiring astronaut than his unusual behavior.

The West Virginia University shortstop, who is expected to be among the top picks — if not the top pick himself — in the Major League Baseball draft that begins Sunday night at 5 p.m., is the kind of character baseball has thrived on since Rube Waddell sometimes missed a start on the mound because he was out chasing fire trucks before a game.

There are now two images WVU fans have of Wetherholt.

The first is the baseball player, who spent his sophomore year hitting . 441 en route to All-American honors and making dazzling plays on the field before his sophomore year never gave him the chance to repeat such feats due to a hamstring injury that cost him a third of the season.

The second, however, was a public image he abandoned late in the year, when his true personality shone through on the field after he made a dazzling defensive play in the Tucson area, leaving the field beating his chest as if he were a character from one of his favorite movie franchises, “Planet of the Apes.”

The roots of this go back to an intrasquad game WVU played shortly after the release of the latest installment in the “Rider of the Planet of the Apes” series.

“I started being a gorilla in an intrasquad game,” Wetherholt said at the time. “And I figured going to Tucson, we were going to play good teams, teams that were ranked higher than us (and) had picked more players than us to win.

“So I figured we’re pretty good at intrasquads, so why not treat this like an intrasquad? So I was a gorilla all weekend, and it just helped some guys stay relaxed.”

After all, this was the real JJ Wetherholt and Steve Sabins, WVU’s new head coach who was serving as coach-in-waiting, had sort of urged Wetherholt to cut loose.

“I’m a big believer that all you can hope to be is authentic, so be yourself. Be as authentic as you can be,” Sabins said when asked how he would lead the team the day he officially becomes head coach. “I think a really good example of that is when we saw JJ Wetherholt become a gorilla in the Tucson area. We talked about it in intrasquad games because he was always yelling and doing kind of silly stuff on the field.

“It was like, ‘Keep it up.’ If you’re weird in intrasquads, be weird in the game… like, be a gorilla. Go ahead and beat your chest. Be authentic. Be yourself.”

This immediately caused a sensation in the team.

“I don’t even make plays and beat my chest,” center fielder Sam White said.

“We knew going into the tournament that we were going to be underdogs in almost every game we played,” left-handed pitcher Derek Clark said. “So we accepted that. We’re going to go out there and have as much fun as we can.”

Of course, this was nothing new at Wetherholt.

Consider his name: JJ Wetherholt.

His real name is “Jonathan David Wethholt”.

So how is he doing, JJ?

During the recent MLB Draft, a Yahoo! podcast called “Bar-B-Cast” had him opening up about a lot of things, including this one.

“My grandmother just put it there,” he said.

Well, not exactly.

“When I was younger, she called me John-John,” he says. “When I moved from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, I went to a youth football camp and the coach asked my dad what my name was.”

“Well,” his father replied, “his name is Jonathan, but we call him John-John.”

To which the coach replied, “I won’t call him that. We’ll call him JJ.”

And JJ got stuck.

On another planet, Wetherholt might have been an All-Galaxy football player because he’s not shy about telling you he was a great fullback in college.

“You can call me a phenomenon. I have a crazy highlight reel,” he said.

He then discovered that in baseball, hitting is a good thing, even if you are not the ball. It’s the same in football, hitting is a good thing, but being hit is a bad thing.

“I got hit. I was a tough guy until I got hit,” he said. “And I got hit hard. I was on the ground, my mom was running around the field screaming, and I was thinking maybe this isn’t the game for me.”

And that’s how he found himself being the man from Mars High School, the Fighting Planets.

It better be the other man from Mars, because right now in the baseball world, the man from Mars is David Bednar, the Pittsburgh Pirates tight end and the son of his high school coach during his freshman and sophomore years.

Like most people from the Pittsburgh suburbs, Wetherholt liked the idea of ​​coming from a school with an unusual name.

“It’s great. You have a planet for life,” Wetherholt jokes. “People ask you where you’re from and you say, ‘Mars,’ and they say, ‘No, get out of here,’ but I say, ‘No, no. I’m from Mars.’”

And there’s even a ready-made rivalry within the conference when Mars takes on Moon Township.

In the podcast hosted at the MLB Combine, the question was asked how Wetherholt became a left-handed hitter and, as always with him, there’s a rather interesting story about it.

“I started out hitting right-handed,” he began. “My dad was teaching me to hit right-handed. But my brother, Bradley, hit left-handed and I wanted to be like him. So I started hitting left-handed. That’s how it all started. I mean, I throw right-handed, I golf right-handed, I hit right-handed… But I saw my brother hit left-handed. I wanted to be like him.”

It was fortunate that he was not an ambidextrous hitter, otherwise Wetherholt might have ended up with a split personality.

But of course, hitting ambidextrously isn’t really an idea that hasn’t been floated around in his head over the years.

“I started hitting from the right side at one point to loosen up my back and sure enough, at one camp, my exit velocity was faster on the right side than the left. I move faster that way, so I tried it, but I hurt my back doing it, so I gave it up.”

Oddly enough, when Wetherholt left high school, he was not a highly sought-after athlete.

“It probably shows that scouting services and baseball rankings aren’t very accurate, first of all. Second, it shows someone who was so passionate about becoming one of the best players in the country that he worked his butt off to get to that position,” said Sabins, WVU’s new baseball coach who was an assistant when he was hired.

“It was a combination of those two factors. He was under-recruited. He was playing on small regional teams and not on these national circuits where you get that attention. His main goal was to play baseball and get better,” Sabins continued.

“I remember he played in a men’s league and then a summer college wood-bat league before he came to school here. And he played for the Beaver Valley Reds, which was not a national team. He was a small second baseman for the Beaver Valley Reds and now we’re talking about him being the first national pick at shortstop.”

Randy Mazey was interested in him early on and Wetherholt liked what he saw at WVU and never hesitated.

“It’s been the best three years of my life,” Wetherholt said at the end of the season. “Coach Mazey was one of the main reasons I came here. There were a lot of reasons, but I wanted someone with a lot of experience and who cared about us as players and I thought he was the guy. Like Sammy said, we do things differently. We go to his house and have dinner together, which is cool.”

“We know his family very well. I go fishing with Wam. I just went fishing with him and Sierra. He taught me a lot about baseball and life in general. We built a lifelong friendship. We will always fish.”

And Mazey?

“There are players that come along in your career and can single-handedly change the face of the entire program,” Mazey said. “Alek Manoah did it in 2019 when we ran the regional; he changed the face of this program. JJ Wetherholt changed West Virginia baseball forever. I have to thank him for that, but JJ knows my relationship with him isn’t over; it’s just beginning.”

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