Cards extend JJ Wetherholt

[Felix The Cat]

Fangraphs has JJ at #6 in Trade Value

Wetherholt is the first of five players in Tier 2: We Get Him For How Long?!. The 2024 draft was an embarrassment of riches, with four picks from that year’s top 10 featuring in the top 15 of this list. Wetherholt went seventh overall, and like Kurtz, he laid waste to the minors until his team ran out of reasons not to see what they had in the majors.

So far, what they have is a Marcus Semien starter kit, and that might be too harsh to Wetherholt. He has roughly average raw power, but it plays way up in games because of his phenomenal feel for hitting. He already has one of the best approaches and batting eyes in the game; he chases far less than average while staying aggressive on pitches in the zone. He makes a ton of contact. He gets the ball in the air and sprays home runs to all fields when he can get his arms extended. He’s a great example of what “game power” means; he might not wow you in batting practice, but he gets the most out of what he has. Something like 15-25 homers feels like a good ballpark range for him going forward, and I’d be surprised if he ever struck out more than 20% of the time or walked much less than 10% of the time.

That reads like a plus but not overwhelming offensive force to me. There’s probably room for more – he’s only 23 and still in his rookie year – but he’s not quite a top bat. But I didn’t pick Semien idly. Wetherholt played shortstop in college, but scouts weren’t sold on his long-term fit there, and the Cardinals have one of the best shortstop defenders in the game in Masyn Winn. It turns out that Wetherholt’s skills look excellent at second base; his defensive weaknesses were his range and throwing arm, but he has phenomenal instincts and hands. That’s a perfect match for second, and shockingly, all three advanced defensive metrics I like have him as the best second baseman in the game this year. I’m not ready to start handing him awards, but I just want to be clear that this isn’t some weird statistical oddity; he looks the part out there and every system that tries to measure what he’s doing thinks he’s exceptional.

What’s more, Wetherholt’s freshly-inked contract extension will keep him in St. Louis for nearly a decade. He’s set to earn an average of $14 million a year for the next eight seasons, taking him to the tail end of his prime-age years. There isn’t much risk in that contract, but that’s plenty of potential reward; Wetherholt is good at so many things that he could fall short of the mark in a few different dimensions and still be a valuable contributor.

The Semien comparison explains why he’s the lowest-ranked member of this tier of young stars with lengthy team control. ZiPS loves Wetherholt, but it loves him at least partially because it thinks he’s one of the best defenders in the league. He’s probably not going to turn into a colossal slugger, and while some hitters can hang at the top of the wRC+ leaderboards without elite bat speed, it’s hardly my base case. I have Wetherholt down as a plus-hit/plus-field player at an up-the-middle defensive spot, which is a really nice package. I think that reasonable minds could disagree and move him lower than the three guys I just listed who have true game-breaking power. Some of the team sources I talked to would have done just that. But I like Wetherholt’s bat quite a bit, and I’m giving him credit for a very high hitting floor based on how effortlessly he cruised through college and the minors. This feels like a fair compromise to me: in a group with the best young values in baseball, but at the bottom of that group.

Only Cardinal to make the list. Winn and Herrera were honorable mentions.