Let’s get excited about JJ Wetherholt

We were hoping for future stardom from the moment he was drafted, and the trajectory of his first full professional season has advanced those hopes

The run-up to the 2024 MLB Draft started on a bit of an unfortunate note for the Cardinals. They entered the December 2023 draft lottery with the fifth-best odds of landing the No. 1 overall pick. The jurisdictional gods of baseball randomness, however, did not favor them, and they emerged from the lotto with the No. 7 overall pick. That was high by contemporary Cardinals standards – their loftiest pick since 1998, when they took J.D. Drew – but dropping two slots in the lottery was an unwelcome twist.

As it turned out, though, JJ Wetherholt quite surprisingly slid to the Cardinals at No. 7. Here’s part of what R.J. Anderson, a draft and prospect expert and my CBS Sports colleague, told me days after the 2024 draft about the Cardinals’ good fortune:

“I would say that, within the realm of somewhat realistic outcomes, this was probably the optimal scenario for the Cardinals at No. 7.

“I had Wetherholt as the No. 1 prospect entering the spring. His slide during the season had nothing to do with his ability or production, and had everything to do with him missing half the campaign because of a hamstring injury. Teams always get a little nervy when it comes to smaller players and soft-tissue injuries. Even then, though, I had a scouting director float him to me about a month or so ago as a dark horse candidate to go No. 1.”

It’s of course early yet – we’re barely a full year removed from the draft of note – but it’s not hard to find evaluators who expect Wetherholt to wind up as the top talent in his class. That’s in part because the work he’s done in 2025, especially since his promotion to Triple-A Memphis, has directly addressed his leading perceived weakness. Said perceived weakness was a lack of power. The hit tool was never in question, and neither was Wetherholt’s patience and discipline at the plate. The raw power, though, was – according to both evaluators and the numbers last season and for part of this one.

First, let’s note the overall arc of Wetherholt’s pro career to date. Typically, you expect some early struggles out of prospects just after a promotion. Wetherholt, though, has leveled up as soon as he’s upped his level. Consider how he’s performed at each rung:

• A (2024): .295/.405/.400, 29 G, 2 HR, 16 BB, 15 SO, 9.3 K%

• AA (2025): .300/.425/.466, 62 G, 7 HR, 44 BB, 40 SO, 14.5 K%

• AAA (2025): .295/.387/.638, 27 G, 9 HR, 15 BB, 20 SO, 16.1%

Yes, the Memphis sample size is small – 124 plate appearances at this writing – but the step up in power production grabs you by the surely fashionable lapels. He’s doing this despite the fact that the competition level is stronger (at age 22, he’s roughly four-and-a-half years younger than the average member of his Triple-A cohort) and the fact that Memphis is a tougher hitting environment than Springfield is. Let’s note that Wetherholt on Wednesday, in an act of brazen rudeness and inconvenience, logged just the second 0-for-5 game of his pro career. That dragged his Triple-A numbers down a bit and ever-so-slightly undermined this point of mine. However, we’ll also note that Wetherholt on Wednesday also notched a trio of hard-hit deep drives for outs that added up to almost 1,100 feet of fly-ball distance.

Anyhow, particularly impressive is that Wetherholt in Memphis has increased his slug by more than 170 points relative to his time in Double-A, and his ISO (what’s this?) has more than doubled. That big of a jump in in-game power would be something to behold no matter what the rest of his Triple-A profile looked like. That he’s achieved that without sacrificing much batting average or plate discipline or significantly increasing his strikeout rate makes it all the more praiseworthy.

Now let’s dive into Wetherholt’s power spike a bit more. We’ll do so by comparing some of his key power and quality-of-contact indicators to those of his Triple-A peers. Our parameters are performance since July 9, when Wetherholt debuted for Memphis, among hitters who have logged at least 100 plate appearances at Triple-A across that span. That gives us a sample of 167 hitters. The numbers: