West Virginia’s JJ Wetherholt throws the ball during a college baseball game against Xavier. (AP Photo)

MORGANTOWN — Move over, Bill Lee, there’s a new Spaceman coming to town.

His name is JJ Wetherholt and he’s from Mars, Pa., but his intergalactic roots are less the reason he’s a budding Spaceman than his out-of-this-world behavior.

This shortstop from West Virginia University, who is expected to go among the first picks — if not No. 1 itself — in the Major League Baseball Draft which begins Sunday evening at 5 p.m. Is the kind of character baseball has thrived on ever since Rube Waddell would occasionally miss a start on the mound because he was off chasing fire trucks before a game.

Now there are two images WVU fans have of Wetherholt.

The first is of the baseball player, who spent his sophomore year hitting .441 on the way to All-American honors and making dazzling plays in the field before his junior year never gave him a chance to repeat such heroics due to a hamstring injury that cost him a third of the season.

The second, though, was a public image he left late in the year as his true personality broke through out on the diamond after making a dazzling defensive play in the Tucson Regional, leaving the field beating his chest as if he were a character out of one of his favorite movie franchises, “Planet of the Apes.”

The roots of that came in an intrasquad game WVU had played shortly after the newest release in the series “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” came out.

“I just started being a gorilla in an intrasquad [scrimmage],” Wetherholt said at the time. “And I just figured, going into Tucson, [we were going to] play some good teams, teams that were ranked higher than us (and) picked more than us to win. So, I was like, we’re pretty good in intrasquads, so how about (we) just treat this like an intrasquad. So, I was just a gorilla all weekend, and it just helped some of the guys stay loose.”

That, after all, was the real JJ Wetherholt and Steve Sabins, the new WVU head coach who had been serving as a coach in waiting, had kind of urged Wetherholt to turn himself loose.

“I am a firm believer in all you can ever strive to be is authentic, so be yourself. Be as authentic as you possibly can,” Sabins said when asked about how he would run the team on the day he was officially head coach. “I think a really good example of that is when we saw JJ Wetherholt become a gorilla in the Tucson Regional. We talked about that in Intrasquad games because he was always screaming and doing kind of silly stuff on the field.

“It was like ‘Keep rolling with that.’ If you’re a weirdo in intrasquads, be a weirdo during the game … like, be a gorilla. Go pound your chest. Be authentic. Be yourself.”

This immediately ran through the team.

“I’m not even making plays, and I’m pounding my chest,” center fielder Sam White said.

“We kind of just knew going into the tournament that we were going to be the underdogs (in) pretty much any game we played in,” left-handed pitcher Derek Clark said. “So, we embraced that. We’re going to go out there and have as much fun as we can.”

This, of course, was nothing new with Wetherholt.

Consider his name — JJ Wetherholt. His real name is “Jonathan David Wethholt.”

So how’s he JJ?

During the recent MLB draft combine, a Yahoo! Podcast named “Bar-B-Cast” got him to open up about a lot of things, including this.

“My grandma, she just placed it there,” he said.

Well, not exactly.

“She called me John-John growing up,” he explained. “When I moved from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, I showed up at a youth football camp and the coach asked my dad what my name was.”

“Well,” his dad answered, “his name is Jonathan, but we call him John-John”.

To which the coach replied, “I’m not calling him that. We’ll go JJ.”

And JJ stuck.

On another planet, Wetherholt might have been an All-Galaxy football player as he doesn’t mind at all telling you that he was a great middle school running back.

“You can call me a phenom. I have a crazy highlight tape,” he said.

Then he got introduced to the idea that in baseball, hitting is good, if you aren’t the ball. Same in football, hitting is good, getting hit is bad.

“I got lit up. I was a tough guy, until I got hit,” he said. “And I got hit hard. I was down, mom running onto the field, screaming, and I’m thinking maybe this isn’t the game for me.”

And so it was that he wound up being the man from Mars High School, the Fighting Planets.

Better make that the other man from Mars because right now in the baseball world the man from Mars is David Bednar, the Pittsburgh Pirates closer and the son of his high school coach his freshman and sophomore years.

Like all those from the Pittsburgh suburb, Wetherholt loved the idea of being from a school with an out of this world name.

“It’s awesome. You have a planet for life,” Wetherholt joked. “People ask you where you are from and you say ‘Mars’ and they say, ‘No, get outta here’, but I’d go ‘No, no. I’m from Mars.'”

And, there is even a ready-made rivalry within the conference whenever Mars faces Moon Township.

On the podcast held at the MLB Combine, the question came up about how Wetherholt came to be a left-handed hitter and, as always with him, there’s a rather interesting story in it.

“I started swinging righty,” he began. “My dad was teaching me to hit right-handed. But my brother, Bradley, was hitting lefty and I wanted to be like my brother. So, I started hitting left-handed. That’s how it started. I mean, I throw righty, golf righty, kick righty … But I saw my brother hit lefty. I wanted to be like him.”

Good thing he wasn’t a switch hitter or Wetherholt might have wound up with a split personality.

But switch hitting, of course, isn’t really an idea that hasn’t been broached to him over the years.

“I started to hit righty at one time to loosen my back and sure enough, at a camp my exit speed was faster righty than lefty. I just move quicker that way so I experimented with it, but I hurt my back doing it so I gave it up.”

Oddly, when Wetherholt got out of high school, he wasn’t a highly recruited athlete.

“That probably shows that baseball recruiting services and rankings are not very accurate, first of all. Then it shows somebody that was so passionate about becoming one of the best players in the nation that he worked himself into that position,” Sabins, WVU’s new baseball coach who was an assistant when he was recruited, said.

“It was a combination of both those things. He was under-recruited. He played on small regional teams and not on these national circuits where you get that attention. His whole focus was playing baseball and getting better,” Sabins continued.

“I remember he played in a men’s league, then in a summer collegiate wood bat league before he got to school here. And he played for the Beaver Valley Red, which was not a national team. He was a little second baseman for the Beaver Valley Red and now we’re talking about him being the first national pick as a shortstop.”

Randy Mazey was interested in him from the start and Wetherholt liked what he saw at WVU and never wavered.

“These three years have pretty much been the best years of my life,” Wetherholt said as the season ended. “Coach Mazey was a big reason I came here. There were a lot of reasons but I wanted somebody with a ton of experience and cared for us as players and I thought that was him. Like Sammy said, we kind of do it differently. We actually go to his house and have dinner, which is cool.

“We get to know his family so well. I get to go fishing with Wam. Just went fishing with him and Sierra. He’s taught me so much about baseball and life in general. We built a friendship forever. We’ll be fishing forever.”

And Mazey?

“Some guys come along in your career that can single handedly change the face of the entire program,” Mazey said. “Alek Manoah did it in 2019 when we hosted the regional; he changed the face of this program. JJ Wetherholt has changed West Virginia baseball forever. I have him to thank for that, but JJ knows that my relationship with him is not over; it’s just beginning.”