His iron will was forged early on. As a youngster, Mitchell would fall asleep with a ball in his grasp. He played pickup games long after nightfall. There's a scar on his leg where he fell on a metal horseshoe stake while chasing a fly ball in the dark. Fifteen stitches closed the wound.
"Baseball was on Andy's mind all the time," said Robert Mitchell, his father. "On rainy days he'd play it in the house, using rolled-up socks for a ball until he knocked a picture off the wall."
His dad taught Andy to pitch. Robert Mitchell would sit on a bucket in the side yard and await his son's offerings.
"I'm not going to move," he'd say. "If I don't catch the ball, you're going into the woods to get it."
That's how Mitchell learned to throw strikes.
He pored over box scores, starred in rec-league ball and fashioned himself, literally, after favorite players.
"However [the Atlanta Braves'] Chipper Jones wore his pants, well, Andy always did the same," Rollins said.
Nolan Ryan, the Hall of Fame pitcher, was his idol - and the namesake of Mitchell's own 3-year-old son, Nolan.
"For 25 years, Andy has eaten, slept and breathed baseball," said Ryan Hodges, a lifelong friend. "As kids, anytime we didn't have equipment, we'd make our own. We would wad up paper towels and coat them with duct tape, making seams on the ball so it would break like a slider or curve."
Excelling on the team at Heritage High wasn't enough for Mitchell. He had to pitch in the classroom, too.
"In one class, we hid a tape ball and a PVC pipe in the cabinet and played ball whenever the teacher left the room," Rollins said. "Andy even kept score and figured up batting averages."
Georgia Tech gave Mitchell a baseball scholarship in 1998 and put him at third base. A year later, Mark Teixeira (Mount St. Joseph) arrived and beat him out at that position.
Undaunted, Mitchell returned to the mound, went undefeated as a junior and helped Georgia Tech win the Atlantic Coast Conference championship.
Though he earned a degree in business management, there was no doubt where his future lay.
"The night before our accounting final, Andy and a couple of other guys bought a huge marker board to help us study," Hodges said. "Within 15 minutes, we had a strike zone drawn on that board and were playing a game of tape ball in the apartment."
