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Rex Brown

Clemson pitcher D.J. Mitchell is expected to be selected in today's MLB Amateur Draft. Most scouts feel Mitchell will be drafted somewhere between the fourth and sixth rounds, and then the question will be is that enough to keep him from returning to Clemson for his senior season.

CLEMSON — Success has always followed D.J. Mitchell.

In high school he was a three-time all-conference pick and earned a spot in the North-South senior game as a pitcher and outfielder for North Forsyth Senior High School in Rural Hall, N.C.

In his first year at Clemson, he hit. 289 with 20 runs scored, 12 RBIs and 8 steals while playing in 51 games. The Tigers were 16-3 in games that he started including a pivotal stretch late in the season that helped Clemson win an ACC Championship as well as advance to the College World Series.

While playing for Thomasville in the Coastal Plain League that following summer he had a .216 average in 21 games, including 20 starts while also registering a 2.25 ERA with a save in 16 innings of relief work on the mound.

His efforts led his team to a league championship as well as being handed the baseball in the championship game. In his only start, Mitchell allowed just one run off two hits in five innings of work.

As a sophomore at Clemson, Mitchell’s success continued, especially on the mound. A guy who was recruited out of high school as an outfielder, Mitchell became the Tigers’ top pitcher by the end of the 2007 season. He finished the year with a 5-0 record in seven starts, including a 3.27 ERA in 15 appearances.

It was obvious pitching was going to be Mitchell’s ticket to the professional ranks when, in the Cape Cod League last summer, he produced a 1.47 ERA in eight starts and 49 innings of work. He allowed just 34 hits and 23 walks with a league-high 58 strikeouts. That performance earned him a spot in Sports Illustrated’s Sept. 3, 2007 issue in the ‘Faces in the Crowd’ section.

Everything was set up for Mitchell, whose name is expected to be called sometime today in first seven rounds of Major League Baseball’s Amateur Draft, to continue his success as he entered his junior season at Clemson. And though eventually that success would come, the 6-foot, 170-pound righty had to first learn how to fail before he could start succeeding again.

“The thing that I believe that he has learned throughout this past year, and sometimes learning involves a little bit of failure, he has learned to be a pitcher,” Clemson pitching coaching Kyle Bunn said.

Mitchell’s failure came at the start of the season when he lost his first decision of his career to archrival South Carolina and then followed that up with a second straight setback at Wake Forest the following weekend. He would go the next two weeks without a decision in three appearances.

“He has learned how to prepare himself mentally and physically and throughout the course of the year he got better with that, and like I said, sometimes there has to be some failure involved in order to do that,” Bunn said. “We felt he made a big step in learning how to be solely a pitcher.”

The first step Mitchell had to adjust to was getting used to his role as not only a weekend starter, but as a Friday night starter. Bunn, who had worked with the pitchers at Mississippi for six years prior to coming on board at Clemson as Kevin O’Sullivan’s replacement last summer, had never worked with a junior pitcher who the year before started the season as an outfielder.

“The toughest thing was getting him to understand life as a Friday night starter in the ACC is a tough life and there are certain things you have to take advantage of and there are certain things you have to do in order to be effective on that level,” Bunn said.

After bouncing around the weekend with a couple of Saturday and Sunday starts and a few midweek relief appearances, Mitchell finally started to find that edge a Friday night starter in the ACC needs.

“It’s a year-long process. It’s not something that happens over night,” Bunn said. “You have to learn how to prepare yourself mentally for the game then you have to learn how to prepare yourself physically. Then you prepare for the game as a whole at the very beginning in warming up and then you have to learn how to pace yourself during the game and how to take the game as it comes to you.”

It all started coming to Mitchell at Duke on April 18. In that outing, he allowed just three earned runs in seven innings of work as he earned his first win in almost a month. Mitchell finished the season with a 6-5 overall record, including a 3.47 ERA in 20 appearances. He ultimately led the ACC with a career-high 106 strikeouts in 98.2 innings of work. That alone was enough to earn him First-Team All-ACC honors.

“Some of his strengths are the fact that he has a strong arm,” Bunn said. “He is very durable, but the biggest thing he has is the sink and the movement he has on his fastball.”

And though Mitchell still has to improve on his off-speed pitches and his changeup has to be a little bit better to set up the effectiveness of his fastball, the pro scouts like what he brings to the table.

“He doesn’t possess the greatest pure stuff in the world, but he gets the most out of it by going right after hitters and keeping his team in games,” said one scout from MLB.com. “There may not be a ton of upside or projection, but there’s always a market for a college hurler who battles.”

Most scouts feel Mitchell will be drafted somewhere between the fourth and sixth rounds, and then the question will be is that enough to keep him from returning to Clemson for his senior season.

“He has an idea and we as a staff have an idea, but we really don’t want to talk about that right now,” Bunn said. “That’s D.J.’s business and we are kind of keeping that to him.”

But whatever Mitchell decides, he’s sure to have a lot of success no matter where he is at. His track record has proven that.