Max Scherzer is good at pitching a baseball.
In many respects, Hunter Dame is a lot like his favorite player, Max Scherzer.
“I really like the way he goes about his business,” said Dame. “I just like his competitive nature and the way he performs on the mound.”
Hunter Dame – the reigning 1 Awards winner for Best Baseball Player – studies the major leaguer and, like Scherzer, prides himself in the art of striking guys out at the plate. After punching out 132 batters his senior year, Dame leaves high school as the strikeout record-holder at Conway High School, racking up 385 K’s in four spring seasons.
“I consider myself a strikeout pitcher, for sure,” Dame said. “There have been some really, really good arms come through Conway. It means a lot for me and my family to have that [strikeout] record at Conway for at least a little while. It’s a big accomplishment. Coming in my freshman year, I never thought I would have that record, so it definitely feels good.”
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He won the 1 Awards last year, but you could argue that he was even better this season. Dame was 9-1 as a starter and posted his 132 strikeouts in just 69.2 innings with a 1.11 ERA. He finished with a 32-8 record on the mound for his career.
Conway head coach Clay Bilyeu deserves much of the credit for that success, because Dame nearly hung up his cleats for a pair of basketball sneakers.
As a middle schooler, Hunter fell in love with basketball and put baseball on the back burner. That is, until Bilyeu gave him a chance during the summer after his eighth-grade year to play in tournaments with the varsity squad.
“In junior high I stated playing basketball and really enjoyed basketball,” said Dame. “I kind of fell away from baseball for a little bit. When I was in eighth grade with Coach Bilyeu, I got the opportunity to play with the varsity. I knew I had the stuff and the talent to play, but basketball had taken over my life. Coach Bilyeu let me play with the varsity in a couple tournaments in the summer and it was just really enjoyable for me.”
“I had him in junior high PE class,” said Coach Bilyeu. “He obviously excelled at both [basketball and baseball]. I hit him up one day in class and asked him which one he thought he preferred. He was definitely more focused on basketball at the time. I just remember asking him not to give up on baseball yet. Once he got into high school, it would be different from what he experienced as a younger kid… Going into his freshman year, I was rolling him out there and pitching him against Class 5 schools in the summer and he was holding his own as a 14-year-old kid.”
“I quit playing basketball at the start of my sophomore year to focus on baseball,” Dame said. “Things got serious about that time and I started looking at colleges and I wanted to pour everything into baseball.”
You can draw more parallels here between Hunter Dame and Max Scherzer.
Like Scherzer – who also played basketball, and who also grew up in the Show-Me state as a player for Parkway Central High School and eventually Mizzou – Dame will keep his talents in the state of Missouri and toss the hardball for the Missouri State Bears.
“[MSU] is only about forty-five minutes from home,” said Dame, “but they made it feel like a home away from home. They showed me campus, talked to me one on one, and made me feel like I could handle all the things it takes and things I could look forward to as well.”
Dame will step into an already-established program with the Bears. Under head coach Keith Guttin, MSU has enjoyed 33 consecutive winning seasons and lose players to the MLB draft on a perennial basis. In 2015, the Bears emerged from the Springfield Regional and advanced to the Super Regional, but fell to Arkansas and came up just shy of a College World Series birth.
“I hope I can come in and fill innings,” Dame said. “I can come in and bring a good attitude and work ethic, and hopefully bring things that those guys bring to the table and be able to mimic them in that sense.
“I want to go out there to compete on a daily basis. Things aren’t always going to go my way like they often did in high school. I want to work on my pitches and improve my breaking ball, fastball and everything else, just perfect it even more than I’ve tried to currently.”
Conway finished 28-4 this season. They won their district title over Forsyth and beat Stockton in sectionals before falling to the eventual state champs Mountain Grove in the Class 3 quarterfinals.
“I’m going to remember it as a successful year,” said Dame. “I was able to kind of grow with my friends since I’ve been with those guys since I was itty bitty. I hate for it to end the way it did. And I feel like if we played that game again, things could have gone differently and maybe we could have won the state championship. You never know.”
Max Scherzer would be proud of that Big-League competitive spirit.
