Mountaineers’ Wetherholt Might Be Best Hitter Mazey Has Ever Coached At WVU
MORGANTOWN -- On Sunday afternoon, West Virginia's baseball team rescued the final game of its first home Big 12 series of the season by beating Kansas, 12-3, an important moment for the Mountaineers despite the fact that the we are still in the sunrise of the 2023 season.
But here's something that skidded under the radar.
Four paragraphs into the story there was this passing mention of JJ Wetherholt:
"Sophomore JJ Wetherholt also added three hits to tick his average up to .448 on the season."
There are days when this is "STOP THE PRESSES!" news. A three-hit game and an average of .448 for the season?
For many, this is a season highlight. For Wetherholt, it's just another day at the office.
Now, we're not here to tell you that JJ Wetherholt is the best hitter on the planet -- at least not this planet which boasts the likes of Shohei Otani, Mike Trout and Bryce Harper in the major leagues -- but the kid is from Mars and he surely is the best hitter from Mars.
We're talking, of course, of the tiny town of Mars, Pa., in Butler Country just north of Pittsburgh, a town of 1,400 or so residents that is putting itself not only on the planetary map but on the baseball map. It has two professional players from there in addition to Wetherholt, who is putting himself in position to join them.
The two, of course, are the Pirates' All-Star reliever David Bednar and his brother, Will, a 2021 first-round draft pick of the San Francisco Giants, out of Mississippi State.
Just how good a hitter is Wetherholt?
Before this season, following a freshman year in which he hit .306 for WVU, his WVU coach Randy Mazey offered up this opinion:
"JJ's got a chance to be the best hitter I've ever coached in 35 years."
Now that's a strong endorsement but if anything, Wetherholt is exceeding it as he cruises through this season. After a three-hit game on Saturday shook him out of a mini-slump of 1 for 8 in the first two games against Kansas, Wetherholt's .448 average stands eighth nationally with only two Power 5 players ahead of him.
Leading the way is the unworldly LSU star Dylan Crews at .510 and Georgia's Charlie Condon at .453.
Much was expected of Wetherholt this season, especially by himself. But he wasn't really on it as play opened at Georgia Southern.
But he quickly figured it out after a bad strikeout in the third game.
"I wasn't really upset," he said. "I was just kind of shook because I didn't see the pitches well. I usually pick up stuff pretty quick. I don't chase at a lot of pitches like that, but that was really bad. I went back to the dugout and was talking to the guys.
"I was saying 'lefty on lefty, I'm really not seeing it too well.' But then when it got to my turn to swing I kind of erased that. I just figured it doesn't matter if you're not seeing it well. You have to see well now and I tried to really focus on his arm slot while he was warming up and I was in the on-deck circle, I was able to visualize that."
From that point on, everything was together and he was becoming known all through the baseball universe with the way he was hitting out of the No. 2 spot, but before the Xavier game, Mazey decided to move him up into the leadoff spot, figuring it was best to make sure his best hitter and one of his fastest runners got all the at bats he could.
"He gave me a heads up after practice the day before the game. He walked by and said, 'Hey, Jays, just to let you know you're going to leadoff tomorrow.' I was like OK, but I actually grew up a leadoff hitter. I hit leadoff when I was 6 or 7 years old until I was about 14," he said.
The thing about Wetherholt is that there is no real way to put a scouting report together on him. He is one of those "see-the-ball, hit-the-ball" kind of batters. The best shift you can put on him is no shift, because he is a contact hitter who goes with the pitch.
"His balance, his timing, his ability to use the whole field, he has speed, he has power, he does everything that we teach everybody to do," Mazey once said of him. "He can hit home runs to left-center. He can hit home runs to right field. He just sprays the ball around and does everything you could possibly ask."
Now he and Mazey know that hitting is the toughest thing to do in sports and that you are Hall of Fame bound if you make outs two of every three times to the plate. Slumps work their way into everyone's game, but the really good ones work out of them quicker and put them in the in their trunk of life as they move forward.
"Nobody's ever been perfect at baseball or hit 1.000 or anything," Mazey said. "The law of averages dictates that you're not going to get hits every time you're up there. He's been really good at handling the times he hasn't had success … and that's why those times have been so limited."
The real challenge for Wetherholt lies ahead as the Mountaineers this weekend play at Oklahoma State and still have most of the Big 12 to go through. Anyone who follows college baseball understands there's still a lot of curves in the road -- to say nothing about sliders and changeups and fast balls.
But there is one certainty in a baseball life.
If you can hit, you can hit and there's enough games for you to always find your level and that's still what Wetherholt is doing, looking for his level. It looks like it will settle way up there, higher even than Mars.