West Virginia’s JJ Wetherholt runs the bases during a game from earlier this season. He is one of the leading hitters in NCAA Division I.

MORGANTOWN — All of a sudden, baseball season has become fun in these parts.

From Pittsburgh to Morgantown, the sport no longer is just a vehicle to fill time from March Madness to the start of football season.

Winning is fun, you see, especially in baseball, where professionally there is a game almost every day and collegiately there’s four games a week.

What could be more fun than it was Monday morning when the fans woke up in these parts to see those Pirates leading the National League with a 16-7 record, the last seven of the victories consecutive, and to find the West Virginia Mountaineers leading the Big 12 with a sweep of TCU?

The players were frolicking in their success and maybe more so the fans, who are adopting the players on both squads as their heroes and being taken in not only by their play but by their personalities.

It started in Pittsburgh, perhaps, this past winter, when Andrew McCutchen came home. An influx of young talent coming together at the same time and the return of McCutchen brought back memories of years when the Pirates were laden with Hall of Fame talent and were challenging the Steelers for the top spot in the hearts of the city.

In Morgantown, West Virginia’s baseball revival began with the arrival of Randy Mazey as coach and then with the construction of a beautiful ball park nestled into a hillside in Granville that has created an aura all its own.

Add all this together with the new major league clock rule that has livened up the game’s action.

The sport is in the midst of a rebirth and Morgantown and Pittsburgh are along for the ride.

The Mountaineers themselves, perhaps, are leading their own revival with a mix of talented players oozing personality, having as much fun as the fans themselves … and the fans are eating it up like Joey Chestnut eats hot dogs.

During the sweep of TCU, more than 9,000 fans attended the games, some of it despite unseasonable weather, and they rocked and rolled in the stands, at one point in the sold out second game of the series creating a paper cup snake that is the 2023 equivalent of the old wave.

The players themselves, as Kevin Kinder of BlueGoldNews.com noted a day ago, have picked up on it all, symbolized best by a rather unique gimmick that came out of the idle mind of pitcher Ben Hampton, who may just have had too much time on his hands between starts.

While other teams in the sports world had something to give to their heroes after a job well done, be it a touchdown or a turnover, a homer or a great catch, a slam dunk or blocked shot, WVU needed something more to connect with each other and its fans than just the traditional singing of “Country Roads” after victories.

Hampton put together — literally — a Pretzel Chain to be awarded on big hits or plays.

“You have to be as gentle as possible. Ben Hampton spent I don’t know how long making that thing. You have to not break it. That’s the only rule,” said Sam White after wearing it following a home run. “It’s super impressive. He would break the pretzel, lick it and put it back together.”

“I just started putting it together and pretty soon it was a chain,” Hampton told Kinder. “It wasn’t something I had done before, but it turned out pretty well , and then it came out for the Kansas game. I’m surprised it lasted this long. It did get a little break (on Saturday) but I fixed that.”

The glee is that this creates ripples out of the dugout into the stands, just as it does after home runs when they bring the team together for a photo.

In Pittsburgh, the Pirates offer a similar honor to those who deliver big moments, although nothing quite so fragile as a pretzel chain. They have a sword that they swashbuckle — if indeed that is a verb — through the dugout.

The sword comes compliments of a fan who calls herself “Pirates Queen Banshee”, who explained on a Pittsburgh radio show that she talked with pitcher Mitch Keller and told him about her sword at a local brewery during an event.

They kept in touch via social media and she got it to Keller before a game to be awarded on home runs.

This has caught on so well that already there are Pirates sword T-shirts on the market.

One certainly can foresee in this NIL era, an inventive player/entrepreneur, getting someone to put on Mountaineer Pretzel T-shirts, or, even better, a Pirate Pretzel in a kit with instructions on making a chain.

Certainly, there’s a history in such items, perhaps the prototype and most successful in all the world of sports was sportscaster Myron Cope’s “Terrible Towel” from the Golden Age of the Super Bowl Steelers.

It was truly the first rally towel and sold for charity, the “Terrible Towel” raising more than $6 million for the Allegheny Valley School, which cares for people with mental disabilities and physical disabilities.

“The Terrible Towel” was introduced at a playoff game in 1975 against the Baltimore Colts. Steelers linebacker Andy Russell in that game picked up a fumble as part of the “Steel Curtain” defense and rambled 93 yards for a touchdown, leading to a poem written by fan Lisa Benz that was sent to Cope, which read in part:

“He ran ninety-three

like a bat out of hell,

And no one could see

How he rambled so well.

‘It was easy,’ said Andy

And he flashed a crooked smile,

‘I was snapped on the fanny

By the Terrible Towel!'”