Monroe High Memories Remain Rich for Michigan's 1987 Mr. Baseball
By
Doug Donnelly
Special for MHSAA.com
July 22, 2024
WHITE LAKE – Dan Hilliard’s time came before Twitter, before computers were part of everyday life and almost before there was such a thing as Mr. Baseball.
But he fit the bill perfectly.
As legendary Monroe Evening News sportswriter Bill Brenton once wrote about Hilliard’s Monroe High School baseball career, “a complete list of accomplishments would overload this word processor.”
Hilliard was an outstanding pitcher at Monroe High School during the late 1980s. He never lost a game his junior and senior seasons on the mound. He was an all-state choice and after his senior year was named Mr. Baseball, the second recipient of the award that has been handed out by the Michigan High School Baseball Coaches Association since 1986.
Scott Salow, the head coach at Homer High School when the Trojans won 75 straight games and his sport’s national coach of the year in 2005 by the National High School Coaches Association, was a high school teammate of Hilliard.
“He was absolutely dominant,” Salow recalls. “Our best overall player. He could hit and run as well.”
Hilliard was as surprised as anyone to learn he was Michigan’s Mr. Baseball after his senior season.
“I didn’t know there was any such thing as Mr. Baseball,” Hilliard said.
After going 9-0 with a 1.42 ERA and a .506 batting average in 1987, Hillard was invited to play in the MHSBCA All-Star Game at Tiger Stadium in Detroit. At a pregame dinner, one of the board members pulled him aside and told him they were going to call him up to the podium and introduce him as Mr. Baseball.
“I just thought, ‘Wow, OK,’” Hilliard said. “I didn’t really think baseball had that award. I didn’t really think of it.”
Hillard was a pitcher-outfielder for Monroe. For his career, he went 27-2 as a pitcher and had 57 stolen bases in 60 attempts.
“To me, I didn’t think I did anything super crazy,” he said. “I was part of a really good team. We put together a lot of wins. To me, I was just a part of the team. I didn’t think I stood out more than anyone else. It’s humbling to think back on those times.”
Longtime Blissfield coach Larry Tuttle – who has the most wins of any high school baseball coach in Michigan history – coached Hilliard in American Legion ball. Tuttle’s Blissfield team won the prestigious Monroe Auto Equipment Co. Baseball Tournament during Hilliard’s senior season, but Hilliard received the Most Valuable Player Award.
“He was very deserving of that honor,” Tuttle said. “He was a great pitcher, the best around. We recruited him to play summer ball with us.”
Tuttle was on the Mr. Baseball selection committee when the award began.
“We met and talked about it and decided we needed to do something to honor the best player in the state,” Tuttle said. “Dan was no doubt deserving after the season and career he had.”
Hilliard grew up in Monroe, near the shores of Lake Erie, playing recreation baseball during the week and on a travelling “all-star” team that a few parents would organize on the weekends. As a youngster he played in the famed Monroe County Fair All-Star Tournament, which dates back to the early 1960s and is still going strong.
At Monroe, he couldn’t play high school baseball until his sophomore season.
“Back then, the high school was only sophomores through seniors,” he said. “I wasn’t at the high school as a freshman.
“I was a little intimidated at first,” he added. “It didn’t take long for me to realize I did belong up there on the varsity. I was the youngest guy on the team, so a few guys took me under their wing. I had a great time.”
Hilliard went 4-2 as a sophomore hurler for Butch Foster’s Trojans. His junior year is when he shined the brightest, going 14-0 on the mound with a 0.69 ERA and 155 strikeouts. He easily was picked as the player of the year by the local newspaper. He followed that up with another undefeated senior season and then joined Tuttle’s Blissfield-based American Legion team for the summer.
“I put together three pretty good years,” he said. “That was that.”
He made the short drive to Blissfield one afternoon for a game.
“It was my night to be on the mound, so I was in the bullpen warming up and Coach Tuttle came up to me and said, ‘Hey, I need to talk to you.’ That’s when he told me I was picked for the East-West All-Star game. I thought, well, that’s pretty cool,” Hilliard recalled.
Once in Detroit, the all-star players got together for a workout, then went to a banquet where Hilliard was announced as the statewide player of the year.
“A lot of the guys there were guys I had never heard of or never played against,” he said. “They were from different parts of the state.”
Hilliard went to Central Michigan University to play baseball, but never donned the Chippewas uniform. When his sophomore season rolled around, he transferred to Spring Arbor University near Jackson, where his older brother and Salow were playing baseball.
“I thought it was a better fit for me,” Hilliard said. “It ended up being great. I loved playing college baseball.”
It was at Spring Arbor where a teammate introduced him to his future wife, Elizabeth. They moved to White Lake soon after where they still live and have raised three children, ranging in age from 20-28. Sports remained a big part of Hilliard’s life. His two daughters both played volleyball in college, and his oldest daughter is now a coach at a university in Illinois. His youngest daughter plays college beach volleyball in North Carolina. His son was a three-sport athlete in high school who studied turf management at Michigan State University.
Hilliard works for an electrical supply house in Waterford.
“Things are going good,” he said. “It is a very nice place to live. There are a lot of lakes around here.”
His Mr. Baseball plaque hangs on the wall in his basement, right next to a photo of him at Tiger Stadium with the rest of the East-West all-stars.
“It pops into my head every so often,” he said of his high school days. “I pay attention to the local high schools up here and see who’s playing well. I think about those times a lot. I don’t talk about them often, but I think about it.”
He doesn’t have video clips of games he pitched, but the memories are strong.
“In this day and age with internet and YouTube and all these videos, you see a lot of great players in the state,” he said. “I wonder what it would have been like if I would have been in this modern day.”
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PHOTOS (Top) At left, Dan Hilliard pitches for Monroe High as a senior in 1987; at right, he holds up his Mr. Baseball Award that continues to hang on a basement wall. (Middle) Hilliard headlines in the Detroit Free Press on June 18, 1987. (Top photos courtesy of Dan Hilliard. Clipping courtesy of the Detroit Free Press.)
Fish's Powerful Record Pursuit Helped Set Stage for College, Pro Achievements
By
Steve Vedder
Special for MHSAA.com
August 27, 2026
Many of the home runs were prodigious, some of the balls landing on the tops of schools, crashing onto car roofs, into clumps of trees, empty parking lots and neighboring practice fields.
Two of Zach Fish's record-setting clouts, in fact, landed on the I-94 expressway and in the middle of a cemetery.
But it wasn't the variety of locations that made his homers remarkable. It was their number.
As a senior at Richland Gull Lake in 2011, Fish set the state single-season home run record with 24. The total not only broke the record of 23 set by Morley-Stanwood's Jim Willison in 1998 and Drew Henson of Brighton in 1997, but no hitter since has even made a serious run at breaking Fish's mark. The closest has been 15 homers by Zach MacDonald of Portage Central in 2021.
"There were some fun ones," Fish said of the homers.
Fifteen years later, Fish, now a corporal for the Granbury, Texas, police force, said he looks at his record-setting season much the same as he did during the final three months of his high school career. He remembers feeling a sense of accomplishment, but also relief as the Blue Devils, which would finish 38-2, could now switch focus from Fish's record to the drive of winning a state title.
Fish said when he thinks back over his career, it's not only the home run chase he remembers but also cherishing a leadership role on a young Blue Devils club. Fish also remembers the 5 a.m. offseason workouts designed to strengthen his 6-foot, 200-pound frame, and always seeking new ways to hone his special talent for recognizing and adjusting to how high school pitchers were trying to get him out.
As for the record, Fish also recalls the torrid late-season stretch it took to surpass Henson and Willison. Just when it looked like he could fall short, Fish slammed 16 homers over his final 17 games, including his last three in the Regional tournament to break the record.
Fish said an overlooked part of the 24 homers – and something which was probably a benefit – was that aside from local media, no one was clamoring for stories each step of the way. There was minimal distraction outside of the Gull Lake community as Fish approached breaking one of the most sought-after state records.
"There wasn't any social media back then. Not much hype or noise around it," he said. "And I got a lot of positive reinforcement from the people around me. No one said anything if I came back to the bench without hitting a homer or getting a hit. The important thing was we were winning as a team. I think my success was a product of how successful the team was.
"I stayed within the mindset of the team. With all the people around me, I never got too high or too low. That helped me focus.”
The 24 homers closed out a remarkable career for Fish, who after his senior season was taken by the Texas Rangers in the 24th round of the 2011 MLB draft. Fish, who hit .561 with 82 RBIs as a senior, was named to the Rawlings, Baseball America and MaxPreps All-America teams. He would be recruited by Michigan, Clemson, Vanderbilt, Louisville, Washington and Georgia Tech before signing with Oklahoma State, where he would become the Big 12 Player of the Year as a junior.
Fish's story from growing up playing in a Kalamazoo recreation league as a grade schooler to being taken by the Chicago White Sox in the 11th round (318th overall) of the 2014 draft and spending two years in pro ball includes, by his own admission, an extraordinary drive to succeed.
"Bordering on obsession," he said. "Baseball was more than a passion with me. I loved baseball and what it stood for. It's America's pastime for a reason."
Growing up, Fish actually showed minimal signs of becoming a nationally elite-level player. He played rec ball in Kalamazoo and later hooked up with the Midland Braves travel team for three seasons as a 16, 17 and 18-year-old. He played two seasons at Kalamazoo Central where he batted .291 with five homers as a freshman and then .423 with six homers as a sophomore.
Family obligations led him to transfer to Gull Lake as a junior, where he quickly blossomed. He hit .473 with 12 homers, 57 RBIs and 27 stolen bases.
"Coaches would help me," Fish said of his power. "They said just swing hard in case you hit it. I truly believed that. The first two years in high school I was kind of sporadic in terms of hard contact. A lot of that was in my approach."
Fish's junior season set the stage for his sensational final year. He barely had double digits in homers by midseason before catching fire in the second half. But with 21 homers heading into the Regional, he was still two short of tying the record. He climbed to within one when he homered during a 12-2 Regional opener win against Sturgis, then slammed two more in a 13-2 Regional Final victory over Hamilton to set the record.
With the achievement accomplished, Fish said he remembers returning to the bench after the second homer against Hamilton with mixed emotions.
"At first I came back like it was just another homer," he said. "I was in the dugout, put my (catching) gear back on and I had this moment of what I did. But at the same time, I was glad it was out of the way and now we could focus on the team and winning a state title.
"The last three weeks was a good stretch, but I was able to swing the bat because the guys in front of me were getting on base and pitchers had nowhere to put me."
In a 6-5 Quarterfinal win over Grand Rapids Catholic Central, Cougars pitchers virtually refused to pitch to Fish. Amid a flurry of intentional walks, Fish saw only one strike, which he smashed for a bases-loaded triple. The team concluded its season with a 6-1 Semifinal loss to eventual Division 2 champ St. Clair as Fish flew out twice and was safe on an error in his final high school at-bats.
According to MaxPreps, the 24 homers ties Fish for 27th place nationally, just six behind the all-time record of 30. His 82 RBIs as a senior ties him for 26th place. Fish finished his prep career with 47 home runs, 23 behind the state record of 70 hit by Henson from 1995-98. Fish's 203 career RBIs are second behind Henson's 290. The 24 homers in 116 at-bats means Fish hit a homer an incredible once every 4.8 at-bats.
Former Gull Lake coach Bill Blakely said Fish was always striving for perfection as a hitter. He recalls Fish would often come back to the bench following a home run lamenting his swing could have been better. As for the record, Blakely said he would occasionally move Fish around on defense, including making use of his 90-mph fastball on the mound, to keep his mind off hitting. Blakely reasoned Fish could get a break from the pressure of the home run chase if he had to focus on defense.
"Externally, he didn't show that it bothered him," Blakely said of the chase. "We had lots of kids who could keep him loose. It was a light atmosphere. We would count the homers as they came along, but he didn't go into any slumps as he got close.
"As for the record, it wasn't if he was going to set it, but when, barring an injury."
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PHOTOS (Top) At left, Gull Lake's Zach Fish follows a drive during his senior season in 2011, and at right Fish is now an officer in Granbury, Texas. (Middle) Fish takes the field as part of the Rookie-level Great Falls Voyagers. (Below) Fish mans the catcher position for Gull Lake during a Division 2 Semifinal against St. Clair in 2011. (Granbury and Great Falls photos courtesy of the Fish family. Hitting photo by Gary Shook. Catching photo from MHSAA archives.)