Baseball Remains Front of Tuttle's Mind, Close to Retired Coach's Heart
By
Doug Donnelly
Special for MHSAA.com
June 29, 2023
BLISSFIELD – Larry Tuttle jogged out of Tuttle Dugout onto the artificial turf at Adrian College and took his spot in the third base coach’s box, looked in at the batter as he approached the plate and clapped his hands.
It’s like he never left.
For more than 50 years, Tuttle occupied the third base coach’s box for the Blissfield Royals. He is the winningest high school baseball coach in Michigan history and one of the winningest prep baseball coaches in America. It’s been two years since Tuttle last coached the Royals, but when the Lenawee County All-Star Game came around this year, and Onsted coach Matthew Randall was named a head coach of one of the teams, one of his first calls was to Tuttle.
“To see him coach third base again for two innings of that all-star game was nothing short of amazing,” Randall said. “I love that man and everything he has taught me.”
Tuttle and Randall faced off about 40 times over the years.
“There’s a lot of respect between us,” Tuttle said. “I was happy to do it.”
Tuttle, 79, is a Morenci native who played baseball and graduated from Adrian College, coached for one year at Temperance Bedford and five decades at Blissfield. He spends a little more than half of the year in Florida these days in a house he owns in The Villages, a retirement community about an hour north of Orlando.
This past spring, Blissfield took a spring baseball trip to Florida and Tuttle was able to come out to the field and watch a few practices.
“That’s the best time,” he said. “I always enjoyed those first practices of each season. People will ask me, ‘But what about the cold? It’s always so cold in Michigan that first week.’ The first 10 days or two weeks or so inside, that’s where we formed our whole season, working on the fundaments and the strategy, getting the kids mentally ready for the season. That was a fun part of coaching.”
He returns home to Michigan each summer to spend time with his kids and grandchildren, including a freshman-aged granddaughter who is showing good things in softball. His roots are in southeast Michigan, and he has every intention of keeping it that way.
Tuttle’s career at Blissfield was nothing short of remarkable.
He coached Blissfield for 54 seasons. It would have been 55, but the 2020 season was canceled due to COVID. The Royals won 1,332 games during his career. They won 33 District titles, 23 Regional championships and seven Finals crowns. Blissfield also won 40 league titles, including in his final season of 2021. His No. 18 jersey was retired by the school district.
In 2015, Tuttle was an easy inaugural choice for the Michigan Baseball Hall of Fame.
This summer, Tuttle returned to Michigan in time to see Blissfield play a few regular-season games and was there when his beloved Royals played in the Division 3 District tournament. He wore his familiar Royals gear. When the Lenawee County All-Star game was played, Tuttle was in his full Blissfield uniform. It still fits perfectly.
“I still enjoy the game,” Tuttle said. “It’s my energy level that just isn’t what it used to be. That’s why I stepped down. I still love the strategy of the game.”
When he’s watching a game, he still goes through every play in his mind and what he would do if he was calling the shots.
“You’re always coaching even though you might a spectator,” he said. “It may not be the right way, but it’s my way. That’s baseball. I love thinking about what to do on this count or that count, to take a pitch or not.
“I see a lot of coaches these days who had played in college. Young coaches coach the college way, but you are dealing with high school kids who may not have a real firm understanding of the game itself. You have to teach high school baseball to college kids. You don’t teach college or pro ball to high school kids.”
Tuttle, who has battled some health issues the last couple of years, misses being in his role as coach.
“I miss the players and the relationships I had with umpires and the other coaches,” he said. “It’s hard to replace that.”
Tuttle is an icon in Lenawee County. When he goes to a game, people gather around him to talk. He still follows the area teams and has a relationship with several coaches and ex-players.
Tuttle enjoyed monumental success at Blissfield. The Royals’ last sub-.500 season was in 1971.
“I know that because I have the records,” Tuttle said. “The closest we came was we were 8-8 one year in the 1980s.”
Tuttle has been a stickler for stats his entire career. Some coaches have a hard time remembering how their team did two years ago. Tuttle knows. He kept intricate stats on every team he’s coached at Blissfield and to this day has them organized only a few steps away from his kitchen table at his home in Blissfield – which is just across the street from the high school and a long home run away from the baseball field that is named in his honor.
“I have a file cabinet full of files from each season and I have the scorebook from every year I coached at Blissfield, starting in 1968,” Tuttle said. “Stats were always important to me, not the wins, but the stats. Baseball stats tell you so much about the game.”
Since stepping aside, Tuttle has had time to reflect on his career.
“I would have never believed I would have coached that long,” Tuttle said. “Then, I sit back and think, ‘That was a lot of wins, wasn’t it?’ I don’t mean that in a bragging way. I think more about it when I go to a game.”
Randall recently announced his retirement from Onsted after 13 years as head coach. Onsted is in the same conference as Blissfield, the Lenawee County Athletic Association, so he had a close-up view of Tuttle in action.
He now has a memory of the last game he coached at the All-Star Game at Adrian College.
“I credit a lot of my coaching philosophy to this day to him,” Randall said. “Our relationship has really grown over the years. I wanted Coach Tuttle to be with me in my final game. That’s why I asked him.”
PHOTOS (Top) Retired Blissfield baseball coach Larry Tuttle coaches third base during the June 26 Lenawee County All-Star Game. (Middle) Tuttle’s jersey is retired during a 2021 ceremony. (Photos by Doug Donnelly.)
Airport Graduate Villarreal Hoping to Receive Call on WPBL Draft Day
By
Steve Vedder
Special for MHSAA.com
November 19, 2025
It hasn't always been the smoothest of paths for Bella Villarreal – but considering the trail-breaking nature of her quest, she refuses to second guess her choices.
Which is how it goes for someone trying to make the leap from a high school of fewer than 800 students to becoming the first Michigan native to play in the new Women's Professional Baseball League.
A graduate of Carleton Airport High School and presently a freshman at Eastern Michigan, Villarreal's journey includes overcoming her own doubts, ignoring skeptics, poking a hole in a sport universally reserved for males and traveling hundreds of miles to find suitable competition. It's a long and continuing fight she's hoping will culminate in her being among the players taken in the inaugural WPBL draft Thursday.
While Villarreal describes herself as a football fan and someone who could never get into softball, dabbled in basketball and pushed thoughts of playing volleyball to the back of her mind, her first love has always been baseball. It's been that way since before she stepped into her kindergarten classroom and peaked after shining in a WPBL tryout in Washington, D.C., in August.
"I've been drawn to baseball since I was a 4-year-old playing T-ball," Villarreal said. "I've always wanted to play baseball. It's inspirational to me and was always a goal for me to play. I never wanted to stop something that made me feel so good."
While she harbors a deep love of baseball, the sport, however, hasn't always returned that affection. After playing in local boys leagues growing up, Villarreal – a pitcher and second baseman – made the Detroit Bees boys travel team as a 9-year-old. From there she graduated to the Indians Baseball Club as an 11-year-old and then finally more travel ball with the Cubs club as a 15-year-old. She's played in three Baseball For All events, the largest girls baseball tournament in the country.
Along the way Villarreal has encountered support, but also a prevalent attitude that girls who favor a sport with a bat and ball should be playing softball, not baseball. By the time she was 16, Villarreal, by then long committed to a future on the baseball diamond, was having to travel all over the Midwest to find baseball tournaments.
What she found was scattered acceptance among some male teammates, but also a frustration with traveling around a half-dozen states to play the sport she loved.
One of the turning points of Villarreal's fledging baseball career came at Airport High School. After her extensive inclusion in travel leagues, Villarreal made the school's junior varsity baseball team as a freshman and sophomore. While there were bumps along the way, the foremost lesson Villarreal took from that school's baseball program was that she could indeed succeed playing against the boys. She also honed fundamentals and learned the value of everyone pulling in the same direction.
According to the National Federation of State High Schools Association (NFHS), there are no states with girls baseball as a sanctioned sport – but the organization counted 1,372 girls who played baseball on high school boys teams this spring. While Major League Baseball estimates 46 percent of all baseball fans are women, only nine women played on NCAA men's baseball teams in 2024.
None of which has deterred Villarreal's love of the game.
"I worked hard and wanted to be part of the team. I learned that there is no "I" in team," Villarreal said of her time at Airport. "And I think it also confirmed my ability. I knew if I did well in high school, I could do it any place."
Armed with the confidence that she could carve a space in the sport, Villarreal, now 19, has tried to improve her game with twice-a-week hitting workouts and four days of work designed to improve her strength and speed.
The work has paid off. She came away from the first WPBL tryout in Washington, D.C., with hopes of being taken in the draft. The tryout included players from 10 countries, including a dozen from Japan, which has the top-ranked women's team in the world by the World Baseball and Softball Federation. In all, the first day of tryouts included 600 players from across the country and as far away as Australia, Mexico, South Korea, the United Kingdom and France. Cuts were made after each of the four days, with Villarreal surviving all of them. That's a hopeful sign she will be taken in the draft by one of the league's four franchises.
Villarreal admits the tryouts, which concluded with inter-squad games, were high stress.
"Of course I was nervous," she said. "But I made some friends there who helped me stay motivated that I could get through it. It was serious, but everyone had fun, which was a big thing. There were jitters the first day, but then I was good at becoming myself. To make the second and third days, you knew you must be doing something right. I started becoming confident with the things I knew I could do."
Originally slated to include six teams, the league will start play in May with teams in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Teams will have 15-player rosters which will play a seven-week regular season. It's not the first attempt at forming a professional women's baseball league. There have been four previous attempts beginning with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II and the most recent with Ladies League Baseball in 1997-98.
Villarreal believes given time and enough resources, women's professional baseball can thrive. She would love to look back on her time as being among the trailblazers in that progress.
"Absolutely, there is interest," she said. "I know there have been attempts before, and some really haven't stuck. But I think we can build it up to a place where girls have more of an opportunity."
For those girls who would someday wish to join that quest, Villarreal has advice.
"You should know where you're supposed to be," she said. "Do what you love as a challenge, and just be who you are. It doesn't matter what sport you play – know that you are capable."
Editor's note: Villarreal was drafted in the fifth round of the WPBL Draft by Los Angeles, the 82nd pick overall of 120. She was selected as a second baseman, and was one of two Michigan players drafted. Jordan Eyster of Royal Oak, a 21-year-old outfielder, was selected in the fourth round by San Francisco.
PHOTOS (Top) Airport grad Bella Villarreal watches from the dugout during a USA Baseball Development Program event. (Middle) Villarreal steps to the plate as a member of Carleton Airport’s junior varsity baseball team. (Below) Villarreal takes a photo while pointing toward her mother Tonya. (Photos provided by the Villarreal family.)