MLB Draft is more than a dream for Providence Day pitcher with a 91 mph fastball
Providence Day School’s John Miralia, a 6-7, 240-pound left-handed pitcher, believes that, if he has really good senior season, his whole life could change.
Miralia, 18, who signed with N.C. State, can throw as fast as 91 miles per hour on his fastball, but claims that his breaking ball — which moves from 12 o’clock to 6 — is his best pitch.
Perfect Game, which tracks elite recruits, ranks Miralia a 9.5 on a 1-10 scale. A player who ranks a 9, it says, “is a potential (Major League Baseball) top-10 round pick and/or highest level of college.”
A 10, the site says, is a potential very high draft pick or an elite level college prospect.
“I wouldn’t be surprised that if I have a good season I get picked” in this year’s MLB draft, Miralia said. “The draft is weird though. Like, you don’t really know where you’re going to fall unless you’re a legit, legit dude, and even then, some dudes fall lower than they thought.”
For now, Miralia is focused on his upcoming senior season and helping Providence Day contend for a state championship.
Providence Day was 18-7 last year and lost in the state semifinals.
Two years ago, Miralia was 1-2-2 with a 2.91 ERA and 22 strikeouts. Opposing teams hit .220 against him.
Last year, as a junior, Miralia was dominant, going 7-0-1 with an 0.68 ERA. He had 98 strikeouts and teams hit .164 when he was pitching.
“My sophomore year, I had two really good guys in front of me (Justin Murray, now at Dartmouth and Owen Tappy, now at Hampden-Sydney), and being able to watch those guys throw and doing what they did during the week to prepare, their maturity, taught me a lot.”
Flipping from Duke to NC State
After his junior season, Miralia said he heard from more than a dozen major-league teams, including the Mets, Dodgers and Tigers.
He also de-committed from Duke, which he had chosen early in his high school career, and last fall he picked N.C. State over West Virginia. His father, Tom, is an N.C. State graduate.
“It didn’t play out like I thought it would,” Miralia said. “(Duke) ended up not being a good fit for me. I committed my sophomore year and I thought it was something I was going to be able to mold and grow and go in there and enjoy it, but as you get older, you start to realize the person you are and it wasn’t a quite a good fit for me.”
Miralia said with the college choice behind him, he can focus on his senior year in high school and whatever comes after that.
“People have asked, ‘Man, how you gonna come back this year (and do better than his junior season),” Miralia said. “You can’t be worried about that. You’ve got to be worried about what can I do to the best of my ability to win this baseball game....At the end of the day, my stat sheet says what it says, but if we end up winning the game, then I’m going to go home smiling.”
