Cardinals' No. 1 Prospect JJ Wetherholt Draws Juan Soto Comparison

St. Louis Cardinals top prospect JJ Wetherholt and Double-A Springfield manager Patrick Anderson spoke with the media about the 2025 season.

Transcript

00:00After the sophomore year was when people weren't saying I could go number one and

00:04XYZ, I never listened to it, I knew I had the talent level to do so.

00:08But at the end of the day, nobody knows what those teams are gonna do, so

00:10you can't really plan on stuff like that.

00:12And then of course, ended up getting hurt early in the season, which is tough.

00:16But yeah, you call it sliding to seven overall, but it's still such a blessing.

00:21I'm super grateful, and you land with the Cardinals, which is an amazing org.

00:24So I'm really happy the way things turned out.

00:27He's a blue collar kid.

00:29He intrigues me because he's a listener, he doesn't go about and

00:34talk and rah rah and all that type of stuff, but he's got a great personality.

00:39It's really cool to see how grounded he is.

00:41I keep referencing Juan Soto, and I shouldn't keep doing it, but

00:44obviously everybody sees what he's done.

00:46It's easy to be able to reference him, cuz I was fortunate to have him for

00:50more of a minor league career than he spent.

00:53But they remind me of each other because they're grounded in their families.

00:58You can just tell they're good kids, and they brought up right.

01:01So I'll give you a quick example, and not to bore you to death, but

01:04I was in, I think, field six.

01:07We were taking BP, and the first time I saw him, we were out there shagging, and

01:10we were getting balls in the bucket.

01:12Usually the pitchers were on those, and he was on that bucket, and

01:15I was gonna take it, and he goes, no, no, no, I got it.

01:17And little things like that.

01:18The kid's not above that, no matter where he was at and

01:21the stature that he's created or put himself in position to be a high profile

01:25guy, he's just like anybody else.

01:28So it's gonna be exciting to be able to see him go about his business.

01:31He turned some heads in big league camp in a sense of how he went about his

01:35business, and it doesn't surprise me, he's a good kid.

01:38For me, it's just focus on playing well here and the rest will take care of itself.

01:41So I mean, my focus is just helping this team win and

01:44doing all that I can to help that happen.

01:47Does it feel more real now that you're in the earshot of the big league club?

01:51Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about that on the way up here.

01:53It's like, wow, there's AAA, and then it's big leagues.

01:57But I mean, the biggest thing is people forget,

01:58it's like you gotta perform at the level you're at.

02:00It's not all about looking ahead.

02:02This is, I had a lot of success in AAA, we skipped Peoria, we're in AA.

02:08So it's a really cool opportunity for me, but I mean, it's gonna be a challenge,

02:11and I'm fully aware of that, excited and ready to go about it.