He became obsessed with sports at around the age of 4. And the only way he could go to sleep was to hear a sports-themed story from his father. His older brother liked them, too, but was happy to hear one and call it a night. For him, though, it couldn’t be just any old story.

Jonathan (as his father still calls him) -- or JJ (as he’s known to the rest of the baseball world) -- Wetherholt had to hear a tale of him coming up clutch in a big moment before he could get a good night’s rest. As for his nickname? It was given to him by a youth football coach who said he was so fast, he reminded him of “JayJay the Jet Plane.” It stuck.

“It always had to end with him scoring the game-winning touchdown, hit the winning three-point shot, get the game-winning hit,” Mike Wetherholt said. “He would only be able to fall asleep if he did the winning thing. If there was a good one, he’d ask to hear it again. If I would tease him and have the shot go off the rim, he’d wait for me to retell it.”

The story where Wetherholt is the main character as a first-round pick in the 2024 Draft -- as he was selected No. 7 overall by the Cardinals -- never made it into his dad’s story repertoire, but he wrote it over the past two years at West Virginia University.

Ballplayers are from Mars … Pennsylvania

Wetherholt cut his teeth as a youth athlete in Mars, Pa., a tiny suburb about a half-hour north of Pittsburgh. Though a town of only around 1,400 people, it’s produced some pretty good baseball talent (more on that later). Wetherholt has a grizzly bear to thank for his family settling into southwest Pennsylvania.

Back in the day, Mike Wetherholt used to fly around 100,000 miles annually as the director of sales for a pain oncology division of a biotechnology company. Home base was Baltimore, a reason why JJ is shockingly a Pittsburgher who is a Ravens fan, and Mike was driving back from an extended trip one December, hoping to get started on a vacation that had been delayed, when he hit a bear in Pennsylvania and flipped the car over several times. It was, he recalled, like a movie scene.

“People are screaming, ‘There are fatalities!’” Mike said. “I say, ‘Hey, I’m alive!’ I get out, I’m bleeding. Some nice man put me in his van and gave me a blanket.”

Because of the injuries incurred, it was recommended that Mike be grounded, permanently. He didn’t want to stop travelling, a work ethic handed down by his parents. His father had been in the military and met Mike’s mother in Korea. She emigrated to the United States and they ran a motel business in Ohio while managing to raise five kids.

But each trip became more difficult, so he cashed in his stock options, got into real estate and settled in near Pittsburgh, where his wife Holly had roots and was closer to the Wetherholts and the motel business in Ohio. Holly has been a Learning Support Teacher in Pine-Richland for more than six years. And Mars ended up being where JJ and his older brother, Brandon, grew up. Brandon, a few years older, played college ball at Division II Gannon.

JJ would follow in Brandon’s footsteps to play at Mars Area High School, but not before playing alongside some kids with pretty well-known dads early on. At age 6, he was part of a 7u team in the area that had a roster that included Drake LaRoche, son of former big league first baseman Adam, and Jacob Wilson, son of former shortstop Jack, both of whom were playing for the Pirates at the time. Drake played first for that team, and went on to pitch in junior college and, most recently, for Division III Birmingham-Southern. Jacob played shortstop, something he did at Grand Canyon University en route to becoming the No. 6 overall pick in the 2023 Draft, and he’s now the best prospect in the Oakland A’s system.

LaRoche and Wilson weren’t there long, with their dads heading to other teams shortly after that 7u experience. Wetherholt stuck around and followed his brother to Mars Area High School, where coach Andy Bednar had recognized his talent well prior to the start of his high school career.

Yes, it’s that Bednar. Andy’s oldest son, David, is the Pirates’ All-Star closer. His younger son, Will, was the Giants’ first-round pick in 2021 and was an upperclassman at Mars when Wetherholt stepped in as the starting shortstop on a team that had five or six Division I recruits on it.

“It was a tall task as a freshman to start and he didn’t miss a beat,” Andy Bednar recalled. “He showed he belonged really early and we never moved him from there.

“At an early age, he was playing with a lot of big-time guys. The way he went about his business, at practice, you knew he was a little bit different than your typical freshman. The extra stuff he’d do before, at and after practice, that’s what really stuck out. He was 14 years old, playing with guys 17 and 18. He looked a little younger, but he definitely showed he belonged.”

From Mars to Morgantown

After two years of starting for Mars, folks in the Pittsburgh area knew who Wetherholt was, but that was about it. He didn’t do showcases of any note and he wasn’t on any kind of national radar. Even in his senior year, he came in at No. 32 overall among all Pennsylvania high school players, according to Perfect Game.

Early on, there was only one school that showed interest, and only one program Wetherholt wanted to play for: West Virginia University.

“This was my only actual offer, but I committed right before my sophomore year, so I’d like to think other schools probably would have offered, but I really wasn’t a highly sought out guy,” Wetherholt said. “I always had confidence in myself and was just really excited to work hard and try to get to play here.”

Coach Steve Sabins recruited Wetherholt, showing interest after his freshman year. But as Mike Wetherholt put it, “Sabins got him to West Virginia. The Mazey family kept him there.”

That’s just-retired head coach Randy Mazey and his family. It’s a bond that was forged right from the moment Wetherholt got to campus and grew from there, adding to the reasons why Wetherholt loved Morgantown so much in addition to the major he wanted (finance) and how close it was to home (about 90 minutes).

“Coach Mazey has meant a ton to me,” Wetherholt said. “All the other coaches as well, the assistants, have been so huge in my development here.”

That coach-player relationship would become important as Wetherholt burst on the national scene as a sophomore. He was coming off a solid freshman campaign that earned him a spot on the Big 12 All-Freshman Team, but it did not provide a heads up for what was to come. In 2023, Wetherholt was one of the best hitters in college baseball, winning the Division I batting title (.449) with 16 homers and 35 steals.

The Golden Spikes Award semifinalist wasn’t done impressing scouts. He played well for Team USA and during a brief stint in the Cape Cod League, leading him to be ranked No. 1 on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 list last December. With the NCAA transfer portal all the rage -- top 10 players like Chase Burns and Braden Montgomery changed schools -- there is no doubt other programs at least sent feelers to see if Wetherholt might be interested in a bigger-name program. It took Wetherholt less time to make it clear he was staying put than it does for him to turn on a fastball.

“I’ve got to return the favor,” Wetherholt explained. “People who are good to me, I have to be good to. It’s just how I was brought up. For me, it was never a decision of if I was going to leave or not. This is the place that I wanted to come to since I was 14 years old. There was no thought of leaving, really.”

“There’s no way he could go in and say he was transferring,” Mike Wetherholt added. “They treat him like he’s their son. When he got hurt, I had to console Randy. There’s a bond, as a father, I can see. I don’t always have to check on him. Where can you get that?”

The adversity of injury

The only thing that could conceivably hold Wetherholt back would be injury. He had some hamstring issues over the summer and when he left the game at the end of the Mountaineers’ first series of the year at Stetson because of a recurrence of the hamstring injury, there was a collective holding of the breath.

That was on Feb. 19; he wouldn’t return to competitive action at all until April 5, and he didn’t go back to showing scouts if he could handle shortstop for a little while after that. Once he got his legs under him, literally and figuratively, he got back to doing JJ Wetherholt type things, finishing with a .331/.472/.589 line in 36 games. He finished with a 1.243 OPS in 22 Big 12 games and while teams will need to feel confident about his health, he showed more than enough to keep him high up on boards of teams picking in the top 10.

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“It was a lot,” said Wetherholt, who was more concerned about not being on the field to help his team win games. “I think you can worry about it, but for me, it’s a challenge. People have come back from hamstring injuries all the time and it is likely to happen again.

“That’s not to say there aren’t ways to help prevent that. I’ve worked with a great group of doctors, our [athletic trainer] here. I got to work with some of the guys that work for the Steelers. It was a bunch of stuff, just filling my brain with knowledge, learning more and more ways to help prevent it.”

Seeing how a player responds to that kind of setback can provide valuable information, almost as much as performance itself. Bednar, still keeping close tabs on his former player, gives Wetherholt a ton of credit for how he came back, especially in a Draft year. And he’s not the only Bednar paying attention.

“It’s been really cool to watch him go through this process,” said David Bednar, who has connected with Wetherholt during the offseasons in Mars. “All the love he’s getting is more than well-deserved. He’s worked hard for this. I can’t say enough good things about him. Not just what he’s done on the field, but who he is off the field, too. I’m really looking forward to his future here.”

That hard work has turned him from an interesting player in the Pittsburgh area who might be able to play at the next level to one of the best college hitters in a Draft class that is rich in that demographic at the top of the first round. Coach Bednar could tell there was something there, but he declined to claim he knew just how much his former player would grow in college.

“I can’t say I saw it,” Andy Bednar said. “I thought he would be good enough to play baseball at the next level. Once he got to West Virginia, you could see he belonged. What he did last year really set him on a really good course to get to that next level.

“Was he going to be a top 10 pick? I never saw that. I saw he’d be good enough to play pro baseball for sure. The hands worked so well. The ball jumped off his bat. It was just different, real young. He didn’t get worked up in the field or at the plate. He was able to slow the game down.”

Looking back, it might only have been his father, Mike, who saw an inkling of what his younger son’s makeup was like, what would drive him to be who he has become. It all came down to bedtime story choices.

“It only dawned on me later in life,” Mike Wetherholt said. “Brandon wanted to be a part of a team. Jonathan wanted the team to be good, but he wanted the pressure to be on him. That showed up in games. He’s wired that way. Not cocky, but pretty confident, I think.”