West Virginia’s JJ Wetherholt Day-to-Day with Hamstring Injury
West Virginia shortstop JJ Wetherholt is dealing with his second hamstring injury in recent months and is “taking it day-by-day” according to WVU Manager Randy Mazey.
“I’ll save everyone from asking the question, the obvious question: ‘How’s JJ? How’s JJ?'” Mazey told media to start his video conference on Wednesday morning. “Too early to tell. He had some tests done yesterday. We’re just waiting on the results of that. I don’t really have much for you on that note. We’re going to take it day by day. That’s the best way to live, anyhow, so why wouldn’t they do it that way?”
Wetherholt is the 2024 Preseason Big 12 Player of the Year and the Projected No. 1 overall pick in the upcoming 2024 MLB Draft, so to say losing him for a significant amount of time would be a bummer for the Mountaineers would be putting it lightly.
The junior from Mars (Penn.) was 4-for-13 (.308) with one double, three walks, three-for-three on stolen base attempts, and scored five runs in WVU’s season-opening series against Stetson last weekend. He was injured in the first inning of Game 4 of the series when he scored from second on a single from Ben Lumsden. When the inning turned over, Wetherholt was replaced by Brodie Kresser, who came in from CF to play SS.
Wetherholt missed some time last summer due to a hamstring injury in the Cape Cod League and was not 100% during his time with Team USA and the Collegiate National Team. However, Mazey wasn’t convinced that Wetherholt’s strenuous schedule was to blame for the issue.
“You can’t avoid the things that happened to him,” Mazey said. “He pulled a hamstring playing in the Cape this summer. You could just as easily pull a hamstring falling out of a bass boat on Sunday morning. Some injuries you just can’t avoid.
“You try to be careful with your pitchers when you send them off in the summertime and monitor their pitch count and stuff like that, but injuries are part of that. There will always be somewhere there’s no way to avoid them. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just one of those things.”
West Virginia will face Charlotte in a three-game series this weekend, with Game 1 set for a 4:00 p.m. pitch on Friday.
