MORGANTOWN — The questions will begin to get answered at 6:30 p.m. Friday, as the WVU baseball team travels to the state of Florida to begin a four-game series against Stetson.
How will teams pitch to WVU star J.J. Wetherholt? Will teams even pitch to him at all?
“Can teams pitch around me, yeah, I guess they can try to,” Wetherholt said. “For me, it will be a cool learning standpoint. A big thing is if teams are hesitant to give me stuff to hit, I’ve just got to be patient and take the walk. It would be growth for me as a hitter to take the walk.”
And this is where the strategy comes into play for WVU head coach Randy Mazey.
The common baseball strategy today is to bat your best hitter third or fourth in the lineup to maximize that player’s ability to drive in runs.
Mazey’s idea is to keep batting Wetherholt first, even though Wetherholt led the Mountaineers with 16 home runs last season.
“It’s crazy these days in baseball, because you can literally submit nine names into a computer and there is some program that submits back the perfect lineup,” Mazey said. “They can’t measure how the crowd reacts when J.J. steps into the box and the energy that gives you to start a game.”
It also may not calculate the damage Wetherholt can do to the scoreboard with his legs.
On top of his hitting — Wetherholt led the nation with a .449 batting average last season — he also led the Big 12 with 36 stolen bases.
“If people want to pitch around J.J. to start a game, we’ll take that,” Mazey said. “The experts will tell you not to put your best hitter in that spot, but I want the energy in the stadium to be at an all-time high when that guy steps into the plate.”
A leadoff walk to Wetherholt can turn into a double with a stolen base.
“Then I can score on a base hit,” Wetherholt said.
Which, in Mazey’s mind, makes the guy batting behind Wetherholt the most important hitter in WVU lineup.
Against Stetson, that will be sophomore Logan Sauve, who has made some big impressions in the off-season with his improved hitting.
“Logan has had a ridiculous fall,” Wetherholt said. “He was pretty much neck-and-neck with me in every hitting category in the fall, which is amazing to see. It did kind of remind me what happened to me last year in the fall.”
Wetherholt has no power how opposing pitchers elect to pitch to him. What Mazey said he can do is manage expectations.
“Your goals need to be just to exceed expectations,” Mazey said. “If J.J. is trying to go out and hit .500 this year, he’s going to be disappointed. No one has ever done that.
“He just needs to be realistic. If he hits .420 this year, that’s a great year. You can look at it two ways. It wasn’t as good as last year, but who wouldn’t want to hit .420?”
The Mountaineers will have a different look than the team that won 40 games and a share of the Big 12 title last season.
If Sauve and fellow sophomores Skylar King and Ellis Garcia take a leap in development, then they can connect Wetherholt to power hitter Grant Hussey (25 career home runs) in what could be a power-hitting lineup.
WVU’s pitching rotation is also filled with powerful arms with lots of velocity.
Guys like Maxx Yehl, Gavin Van Kempen, Carson Estridge, David Hagaman and Robby Porco were hard-throwing freshmen last year.
Aidan Major was also a hard-throwing sophomore.
Problem was they all struggled with control, and you weren’t sure where the ball was going all the time.
If they are able to find their control, WVU suddenly has a much-different look than it had last season.
“We do have more power arms,” Wetherholt said. “It’s a cool shift, for sure. You think we could have more dominant pitching performances, more strikeouts, but you never know.
“I think we have a chance to be really well-balanced on both sides of the ball. We have a chance to hit for a lot of power and good average. The pitching has looked really good, too.”
TWEET @DomPostSports
