This might be a sign of the apocalypse. For once, I\u2019m really hoping that ESPN is right about something. Today, they have made the bold prediction that JJ Wetherholt will be the National League Rookie of the Year-sort of.<\/p>\n
If you saw JJ Wetherholt\u2019s interviews during the Winter Warmup a couple weeks ago, you know that he believes that this type of preseason hype is \u201cpoison\u201d. He said that he began to deal with \u201cbold predictions\u201d about his future during his college time at West Virginia.<\/p>\n
JJ Wetherholt – \u201cWhere there were articles about me\u2026all the preseason stuff, that\u2019s what we label it. It\u2019s poison. It\u2019s cool to have people talk about you, but at the end of the day, you\u2019ve got to perform. Those guys who hiked you up will be the same ones that tear down as soon as it goes bad. You try to tune all that stuff out and just do the work you can and hopefully that comes true\u201d.<\/p>\n
As I shared earlier in the winter, I think there\u2019s good reason to hop on board the JJ Wetherholt hype train<\/a>, but the optimism should be measured. I have yet to see a player not have to overcome struggles when they first break into the big leagues. The only exception I can think of is Albert Pujols<\/a>. Major league pitchers have a way to find holes in your swing. The good\/great ones adjust and overcome and I\u2019m hopeful that will be JJ Wetherholt\u2019s story. If he even comes close to ESPN\u2019s prediction, I\u2019ll be thrilled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This might be a sign of the apocalypse. For once, I\u2019m really hoping that ESPN is right about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":553167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2403],"tags":[5,160,4,6213,673,67,4311,4310],"class_list":{"0":"post-553166","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-st-louis-cardinals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-cardinals","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-st-louis-cardinals-news","12":"tag-st-louis","13":"tag-st-louis-cardinals","14":"tag-stlouis","15":"tag-stlouiscardinals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116009294029273307","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}