EVERETT — His tools have had Major League Baseball scouts and executives salivating since his impressive performance last summer in the prestigious Cape Cod League. A strong throwing arm and good range in center field. Already 6-foot-4 and 210 pounds, his bat speed produces awe-inspiring raw power and the ability to drive the ball to all fields.
Kyle Lewis, the Seattle Mariners’ first-round draft pick out of Mercer University and now the starting center fielder for the Everett AquaSox, has all the measurables a team could want, and that’s why the organization was ecstatic when he fell to No. 11 in the draft two weeks ago after being projected to go among the first three selections.
“It was definitely a nervous day, but I think it’s naturally a nervous day with the draft,” Lewis said last week following his first workout with his new Everett teammates. “It’s what you’ve been waiting for. For me it’s one of those things for me that I had faith that I would end up where I was supposed to be, and I feel like I’m with a great organization.”
Lewis’s most impressive attribute, however, might not be any of his physical abilities.
The newest Mariners prospect is a true student of the game who possesses a curious mind and an analytical approach. He honed both at Mercer, a small private school in Georgia better known for its basketball team, which upset third-seeded Duke as the No. 14 seed in the 2014 NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
You can argue the merits of whether or not baseball remains The Thinking Man’s Game, but the word “cerebral” isn’t bandied about frequently in baseball circles. Yet it was used more than once by Mercer head coach Craig Gibson to describe Lewis.
“He’s a highly intelligent guy. He’s polished and very mature,” Gibson said. “It’s like you’re talking with a guy who has been in the big leagues. This guy is a cut above a lot of kids in minor-league baseball, not only athletic-wise, but I think when you get a chance to be around him just people skills and personality-wise.”
Your chance to be around him begins tonight, when Lewis makes his Everett Memorial Stadium debut as the AquaSox play the Boise Hawks in their home opener. And the Kyle Lewis Show might not be in town long before it moves on to Bakersfield, Clinton, Jackson and Tacoma en route to Safeco Field.
A grounded student-athlete
When Lewis was 8 or 9 years old, he looked out the car window and noticed birds sitting on the power lines along the road.
“Hey, dad,” he inquired, “how come the birds don’t get electrocuted when they land on the wire?”
Chuck Lewis, a Georgia Tech-educated engineer explained that it had to do with grounding. His wife, Ruth, was impressed both that her husband had an answer and that her son was precocious enough to ask.
“Kyle is a thinker. He’s always been a thinker. He’s very curious about things and how they work,” Ruth Lewis said. “So he’s always been curious, trying to figure things out, put things together and I would really say for the most part he’s just genetically wired that way.”
Many parents of standout athletes give lip service to the importance of education. The Lewises meant it and enforced it both for Kyle and his older brother, Kenny.
Chuck played sports growing up, but did not pursue them competitively in high school or college. He coached both boys in baseball and basketball when they were young, but their involvement never came at the expense of academics. That was always the No. 1 priority and Kyle didn’t compete in as many travel tournaments as some of his more thoroughly scouted high school peers.
“The focus was not on grooming him or positioning him for Major League Baseball,” Chuck said. “It was letting him have fun and when he found things he wanted to work on, such as his swing or training or whatever, we supported that and he did that work. But it wasn’t a point of us trying to get him in the right spotlight to get him in position to get drafted.”
Enamored enough with the game of baseball to sit and watch all nine innings from the time he was a toddler, Kyle took the same approach to baseball as he did to his academics. Eventually Gibson noticed Lewis playing on the Mercer campus in a summer tournament.
“I kind of was weighing the options about whether I just wanted to go to school and pursue an academic path, but I always had a passion for playing baseball,” Kyle said. “I try to think the game and use that same thinking and that same — I guess you could say academic side of it — to apply to the game and to think the game.”
At Mercer, where the 2015 average incoming freshman scored 1210 on the SAT and had a 3.81 grade-point average, Lewis found a home that could nurture both his academic and athletic pursuits.
The best offer
It’s disingenuous to suggest the only reason Lewis chose Mercer was for its academic prowess. Gibson had taken over a then-moribund Mercer team in 2004 and has guided the Bears to three NCAA regionals in the past seven years. After Lewis went undrafted out of Shiloh High School in Snellville, Georgia, Mercer was the best offer he received. The university coupled together partial baseball and academic scholarships, and Lewis became a Bear.
Lewis had the tools, but they were merely that — tools. He was extremely raw, partly because of his limited travel-ball experience and partly because of the time he’d spent playing basketball in high school in addition to baseball.
“We really didn’t need the guy, to be honest with you,” Gibson said. “We had other guys, but (we thought) this one might be too good to pass on because of his athleticism.”
Lewis was a part-time player as a freshman, hitting .281 with two homers and 17 RBI. He started 17 of the 42 games in which he appeared. After playing in the Great Lakes League in Ohio during the summer of 2014, he returned to Mercer and hit .357 with 17 home runs and 56 RBI as a sophomore to earn an invite to the Cape Cod League, where he hit .300 with seven home runs while using a wood bat.
“It was a huge experience for me,” Lewis said of Cape Cod. “Going up there and playing against all the best guys and being able to have success for me was big for my confidence coming into my junior year and leading into this year.”
The knock on Lewis is that he supposedly hasn’t faced top competition because he played at Mercer, though his performance in the Cape Cod League and his success in non-conference games against the likes of Georgia and Georgia Tech tend to dispel that notion. Lewis acknowledges the proverbial chip is sitting on his shoulder, but he does not appear to be defined by it the way some athletes are.
“There are a lot of guys who were successful from all walks of life – junior college, small schools and things like that,” he said. “It’s not like I’m doing anything that’s unprecedented. For me, I just look at it from past experience seeing other guys that come from small places and make it. It’s something I take pride in.”
‘The ideal place’
College baseball occupies a unique place in the American sports landscape. It has its niche fans, but it isn’t followed as closely as NCAA Division I basketball or football, partly because many top high school players eschew college entirely to enter pro baseball. Even the best players drafted out of college are usually at least two years away from reaching the major leagues.
Yet by the time Lewis entered his junior year at Mercer, he had established cult-hero status at Southern Conference outposts such as Greenville, Spartanburg, Cullowhee and Johnson City, where dozens of fans would wait for the team bus and ask for his autograph. He would politely oblige and encourage his teammates to get involved as well.
“He always shared (the attention) with our guys,” Gibson said. “I think our guys were more excited that he got picked than he was the other night, to be honest with you, because he is such a team guy.”
His sophomore season and his time in Cape Cod proved a harbinger to his monster junior campaign in which he hit .395 with 20 home runs and 72 RBI. He was named the Southern Conference Player of the Year for the second straight season and made a number of All-American lists.
Gibson frequently is asked how everyone missed on Lewis out of high school. His answer is simple: no one missed on Lewis, because he simply wasn’t ready coming out of high school.
Gibson said the now-defunct “draft-and-follow” process, by which major-league teams select a high school player and retain his rights for a year while he attends junior college, could have benefited Lewis, but that went away in 2007 as part of Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement.
“I think this was the ideal place for him,” Gibson said. “I think if I was at Georgia or Georgia Tech, I don’t think I’d sign him, to be honest with you. He was a little ways away from being what he ended up.”
The next Adam Jones?
Kyle Lewis’s favorite player is Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones.
The final five words of that sentence cause Mariners fans to wince. It reignites the painful memory of one of the most-rued trade in team history, a five-for-one deal that sent the perennial All-Star Jones, future All-Star pitchers Chris Tillman and George Sherrill, and two minor-leaguers to the Orioles in exchange for a Canadian lefty named Erik Bedard who never seemed to stay healthy. That deal came to define the failures of general manager Bill Bavasi’s regime.
Maybe this pick was a chance to rectify the mistake. The Mariners couldn’t believe their good fortune when Lewis was still sitting there at No. 11 after he was projected to go much higher.
“He said, ‘I want to go to a team that really wants me. I want to go to someone who values me and believes in me,’ and I think he has accomplished that,” Ruth said. “His going to the Mariners, for him, has solidified that. He’s excited about playing for a team who really likes him. And (the organization) has embraced him and the team has made him comfortable and made him feel as if they really want him there, so for him it’s a really good fit.”
Gibson said Lewis has the range and closing speed to remain in center field, but many scouting reports project Lewis moving to a corner outfield spot and compare him to Chicago Cubs right fielder Jason Heyward. For now, Lewis will patrol center field for the Frogs.
“He tries to not only see and do what needs to be done, but also understand why it needs to be done,” Chuck said. “Because that focus was on him getting a degree, he maintained the academic side of things, and that discipline has never been foreign to him either.”
Lewis’s field of study is the game of baseball and Mariners fans now have the rare opportunity to watch this student of the game learn in some of the best outdoor classrooms imaginable.
For the latest AquaSox news follow Jesse Geleynse on Twitter @jessegeleynse
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