MORGANTOWN — The Wetherholt family will be in Texas Sunday taking in all the festivities that comes with the Major League All-Star Game.
They watched the Futures Game on Saturday and will be somewhere inside Globe Life Field for the Home Run Derby on Monday and the All-Star Game on Tuesday.
And, oh by the way, WVU star J.J. Wetherholt just may be the first pick of the draft when it begins at 7 p.m. Sunday.
“That just really blows my mind,” J.J.’s father Mike Wetherholt said. “Just that he’s in that conversation, it blows me away every time someone mentions it.”
That seems to be the consensus where it concerns the Mountaineers’ shortstop. Good college player, sure, but top pro prospect, no one saw that coming.
“We knew of J.J. when he was probably nine or 10, because he would come to our summer camps,” said Andy Bednar, Wetherholt’s high school coach at Mars (Pa.). “The way he swung the bat, even back then, it was a little bit different.
“Then the career he had for us in high school, I mean, I definitely thought he had a chance to play pro baseball, but I never would have dreamed he could be the No. 1 pick.”
That first pick belongs to the Cleveland Guardians, which would be a sort of dream for Mike and his wife Holly, who are both originally from the Cleveland area.
Not only that, but the Guardians’ High A, AA and AAA minor league teams all play in the state of Ohio, just a few hours drive from their home in Mars.
Will the Guardians make that dream a reality? If they do, the slot money for the No. 1 overall pick is worth a signing bonus of $10.57 million, but it’s being reported the Guardians will attempt to spend less than that in order to have more money to spend on later picks.
Cleveland has four of the first 84 picks of the draft.
“I think it’s all been more stressful for my wife,” Mike Wetherholt said. “Jonathan also had a workout with Cincinnati, and he met with the top 13 teams at the combine.
“We met with Cleveland as a family, which really impressed me. They brought us all in for a visit and sat and talked with us. We’ll see what happens.”
At the start
To the rest of the world, it’s J.J., but it will always be “Jonathan” to his father.
J.J. was a nickname given to him by a youth football coach and it stuck with everyone else.
Mike Wetherholt was a pretty good athlete in his day, a college football player at Division II Edinboro (Pa.) University.
It was Mike who first worked with J.J. and his older brother Brandon in athletics, coaching them both in different sports until they reached high school.
Both Wetherholt boys were born in Baltimore — “Being a lifelong Browns fan, we first moved to Baltimore when the Browns relocated there (and became the Ravens), so that was ironic,” Mike said. — but the family moved to Mars when Jonathan was only four.
“Jonathan’s life has been here in Pennsylvania, but I think he remembers a lot about Baltimore,” Mike said. “He was always a Ravens fan, but lately he’s been coming around to liking the Steelers and the Pirates.”
Mike’s assessment was J.J. was always a little undersized, the fast kid who would get base hits and steal a lot of bases.
“It wasn’t until he was 14,” Mike said. “Jonathan played in a summer tournament down on Virginia’s campus. He hit one ball over top the right field foul pole. He had a ton of extra-base hits and some more home runs.
“I was like, ‘Where did this come from?’ It was at that point I thought he could play at the college level. He always had the speed, but if he could mix in power, I thought there would be a chance for him to be pretty good.”
J.J. Wetherholt’s freshman season at Mars Area High School was when Bednar first got his opportunity to mold the young man.
And Bednar knows a little something about teaching baseball. His oldest son, David, is an All-Star closer for the Pittsburgh Pirates, His younger son, Will, was the first-round pick of San Francisco Giants in 2021, and is now pitching in AA ball in Richmond.
“When people ask me about him, I always go back to his freshman year,” Bednar begins. “We had a team with six or seven Division I players and J.J. still looked like a seasoned player.
“We started him off at second base, but eventually moved him to shortstop. Once he got rolling, he took off. He proved he belonged that first year.”
Loyalty
We flash back one year, a year that firmly put J.J. Wetherholt on the radar as one of the top prospects for the 2024 draft.
He had just become the first WVU player to lead the nation in hitting with a .449 batting average and was the Big 12 Player of the Year on top of that after hitting 16 home runs with 60 RBIs.
With one more season of college before Wetherholt could be drafted, his big season put him on more radars than just those of major league general managers.
Wetherholt suddenly became a target of other college baseball teams looking for his services before going pro.
To his credit, Wetherholt said back in February he had made it clear to other schools he was not transferring, but it was never really that simple.
“Let me tell you how it all works,” Mike Wetherholt said. “Word gets to you from somebody that if Jonathan goes to the portal and transfers to their school, they will give him X amount of dollars.
“Now, it was never a coach saying this, but it’s someone who is a friend of a friend type of thing.”
Mike is asked to put a number on his X comment, but he stays away from that. Instead, he hints that numbers “in the hundreds of thousands” were being offered.
“Honestly, there could have been a bidding war,” Mike said. “That was something we never entertained at all.”
The reason, Mike said, was J.J.’s loyalty and the way he felt at home playing for WVU.
That story goes back to when J.J. was still in high school.
Before there were pro scouts in attendance, before Wetherholt was a household name in baseball, there was then WVU assistant coach Steve Sabins.
“Every time Jonathan played in a tournament or some kind of showcase, coach Sabins was always there,” Mike said. “He would be there with a video camera filming the games. He would stay for the whole game. It became very clear to us that WVU really wanted Jonathan.”
J.J. Wetherholt didn’t waste much time in picking the Mountaineers, committing to WVU the summer following his freshman year of high school.
“What really impressed Jonathan with WVU was they already knew everything about him when they first started talking to him,” Mike said. “He was getting letters from a bunch of other schools. He would get some calls here and there, but coach Sabins had gone above and beyond in getting to know who Jonathan was as a person and an athlete. That meant everything to him.”
As Wetherholt got into the later stages of his high school career, other schools began to throw their recruiting pitches at him. According to Mike, some big ACC schools had begun to show a lot of interest.
“He really didn’t pay that much attention,” Bednar said. “Honestly, his loyalty was always with WVU. He wanted to go to WVU in the worst way.”
And now it was three years later, and colleges were once again coming after J.J. Wetherholt, this time with some financial offers that went well past a college scholarship.
“WVU had become his home and Randy Mazey (then WVU head coach) had become such an important figure in his life,” Mike Wetherholt said. “What I told Jonathan is there was no way he could walk into coach Mazey’s office and say, ‘Hey skip, I’m going to leave.’
“WVU was the first school to believe in Jonathan. The people of West Virginia really took to Jonathan and made him feel at home. It became very clear to us Jonathan didn’t have to go to another school to become a top draft pick, so why leave?”
Beating expectations
Maybe it was Sabins who saw something in Wetherholt that few others saw.
Coming out of high school, Wetherholt seemingly was not destined to become a future first-round pick. According to Perfect Game, Wetherholt was the No. 32-best player in the 2021 class. Not in the country, but in Pennsylvania.
His national ranking was as the 225th-best second baseman.
“I think it probably shows that baseball recruiting services and rankings are not very accurate, first of all,” Sabins said. “Then it shows someone who was so passionate about becoming one of the best players in the nation, that he worked himself into that position.”
The work ethic has seemingly always been there with Wetherholt.
“His speed can jump off the page,” Bednar said. “But he’s never been a big guy. He was never really looked at as this dominating figure.
“So, he went out and worked harder than everyone else. To look at him now, I would say he’s the best example of what can happen if you stay the course and remain consistent. Eventually the power came when he was at WVU, and now someone is going to get a guy with speed and power and who can play multiple positions in the infield. Someone is going to get one heck of a ballplayer.”
It’s now just a matter of which team will draft Wetherholt. Multiple projections having him going anywhere in the top 10, which would make him the highest pick ever for a WVU baseball player and the school’s fourth first-round pick in its history.
“Honestly, I don’t think he’s really looked at the projections,” Mike Wetherholt said. “I’m sure he knows what’s out there, but Jonathan seems to be more focused on just playing baseball.
“We were talking about the draft the other day and he didn’t seem like he had his heart set on any one team or place. He was like, ‘If a team doesn’t want me, then it wasn’t meant to be. I want to play for the team who wants me to be there.’ That’s kind of been his approach through this whole thing. He just wants to play baseball.”
