Mercer outfielder Kyle Lewis makes national statement,
Late-blooming Mercer outfielder could be selected No. 1 overall
At the start of his sophomore year of high school, Kyle Lewis attended a tryout for the BigStix Gamers, an Atlanta-area travel team, and worried he didn’t belong with the rest of the kids on the baseball field.
Doubt dogged him throughout the tryout. He didn’t hit well; he didn’t run like he knew he could. He was lost in a sea of players who had played baseball year-round for years while he was just beginning to think maybe he should focus on baseball over basketball.
Tall and lanky, Lewis had the typical build of a talented basketball player and was a standout on the court not only for his high school team but also on the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) circuit. Lewis also enjoyed baseball, a sport he and his older brother, Kenny, had grown up playing, along with basketball.
“He was just OK, and we had some guys in front of him,” recalls Mark Mortimer, president of BigStix Baseball.
But Mortimer remembered Lewis from the tryout. And when he was coaching for a rival high school, he saw Lewis play a few more times.
Coaching first base as Lewis played first base, Mortimer got to talk to him a little bit.
If Lewis was ready to commit to baseball over basketball, Mortimer told him, the team might just have a spot for him in the upcoming summer season.
“Just me watching him play a few more games — we kind of lucked up with that,” Mortimer said by phone recently.
Mortimer wasn’t the only one who didn’t see it right away. Kenny Lewis didn’t think of his little brother as a professional baseball player until last year, when on a trip home his father told him Kyle was leading the country in home runs.
“Conference or country?” Kenny recalled asking his dad for clarification.
Country was the answer. Kyle Lewis finished the season seventh nationally with 17 home runs.
“That’s when I started really realizing that he must be really, really good,” Kenny Lewis said recently as he watched Kyle and Mercer play Butler in Indianapolis.
He’s so good that the kid from Mercer — a private school of 8,600 students in Macon, Ga. — could be the top pick in the Major League Baseball draft.
From his baseball-rich state, No. 1 picks are supposed to come from Georgia or Georgia Tech or the multitude of powerful high school and amateur baseball programs, not Mercer.
But here’s Lewis, on the precipice of millions of dollars, despite being overlooked by the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast conferences four years ago — as well as all 30 major league teams, none of which drafted him out of Shiloh High School in the Atlanta suburbs.
“It’s just exciting,” Lewis said recently at a Comfort Inn on the edges of Indianapolis. “It shows it’s a little validation for what you’ve been working for and trying to accomplish.”
Lewis didn’t play the game that tells so many of today’s youths to specialize in a singular sport, play it year-round and travel across the country to showcases to be seen by professional scouts and college coaches.
“He’s not one of those kids who was always groomed to play sports,” said his father, Chuck Lewis. “He was focused on what he was going to do with his life. That starts with education.”
Kyle was looking at colleges before colleges were looking at him.
“We didn’t have any direction of whether I was going to play a sport or just go to school,” Lewis says. “I didn’t want to end up being one of those guys that sacrificed maybe getting a degree from a high-prestige school.”
WORTH RISK
Lewis had offers to play basketball but stuck with baseball, despite the fact that baseball scholarships are rarely fully funded. Lewis was nearly set to go to Kennesaw State in Georgia before Mercer came in and offered him a 25% scholarship.
It wasn’t much of a scholarship to give, but Mercer coach Craig Gibson saw the quick hands and elite athleticism Lewis possessed.
When Gibson talked to Lewis, the coach was impressed with his SAT score and was sold.
“He’s a guy we really generally wouldn’t take a chance on, just because we like more of a skilltype player when we sign them, because they need to play right away,” Gibson said. “He was different. He never played outfield.”
It seems obvious that Lewis would be an outfielder, especially watching him glide in the outfield now, tracking down balls in the gaps from center field. It’s the spot he was seemingly born to play, except in high school; his infielders were more adept at fielding the ball than throwing it, so he was at first base because he could save the most runs with his long reach.
“The kid did everything right in high school. He wasn’t a power hitter; he did what we asked him to do, which was hit line drives all over the field,” said Reggie Ingram, his coach at Shiloh. “We told him eventually, when you get older and get your grown-man body, home runs would come. That’s what he did. He hit for average, great job on the basepaths, defensively solid. He had a great feel for the game, very baseball savvy.”
And the grown-man body has come, as has the power. The summer after his freshman year, he was player of the year in the Great Lakes League, a wood-bat collegiate summer league, and earned a call-up to the Cape Cod League to get a taste of college’s top competition.
As a sophomore, Lewis took that experience and dominated the Southern Conference, hitting .367 with a .423 on-base percentage, a .677 slugging percentage, 17 home runs and 56 RBI. He returned to the Cape Cod League and hit .300 with seven home runs, tied for fourth most in the league.
The Cape Cod performance boosted his stock, starting talk that he could be a first-round pick. That’s when Lewis decided he really could be someone taken with the first or second overall pick in the draft.
If there was a hole in his game as a junior, it was the fact he struck out 41 times and walked just 19. So he focused on that this offseason, working on pitch recognition and his plan at the plate.
This regular season Lewis set a Mercer and a conference record with 66 walks. He struck out 48 times, but he hit .395 with a .535 on-base percentage, a .731 slugging percentage, 20 home runs and 72 RBI in 61 games. He repeated his honors as conference player of the year in 2016. He also hasn’t made an error in the field since his freshman year.
BIG QUESTION
The Cape Cod League answered some questions, but doubts still come from the fact he plays at Mercer and in the Southern Conference.
Oakland Athletics outfielder Billy Burns heard those concerns, too. Burns, 26, played at Mercer and was drafted by the Washington Nationals in the 32nd round of the 2011 draft. Burns made the big leagues with the A’s in 2014 and finished fifth in last year’s rookie of the year voting.
Since Gibson took over the program in 2004, 16 Mercer players have been drafted and two, Burns and pitcher Cory Gearrin, have made the big leagues.
“When I got recruited, it was still small, but six guys in my class got drafted. And they’ve recruited just a real good batch of players since,” Burns said of his alma mater. “It’s awesome.”
Gibson understands the question of whether a small-college player can succeed in the big leagues. He saw Cincinnati Reds 2013 first-rounder Phillip Ervin, who also had success in the Cape Cod League while he was at Samford. Ervin has struggled to translate his small-school experience into professional success. Ervin is with Class AA Pensacola (Fla.) and hasn’t hit above .241 at any full-season level.
“I think when people look to take you with an early pick and look to put those resources in you, they’re going to pick away at anything to get to you. Is it a drawback? Sure,” Gibson says. “But he’s the best player in the SEC if you put him in there; he’s the best player in the ACC.”
Gibson called the pitching at the midmajor level “slop” compared to the SEC or ACC but noted the Cape Cod League instilled confidence in Lewis and also provided proof he could hit that kind of pitching. Lewis went 5-for-15 with a home run in his team’s matchups against the state’s SEC (Georgia) and ACC (Georgia Tech) teams.
“When you attach a name like Texas or something to a player, he gets elevated. That may or may not be warranted,” Lewis said. “I’m not going to say we have a better conference than the SEC or something. It’s not how it’s made out to be, that he’s not playing anybody.”
At this point, anything Lewis does at the next level won’t surprise Gibson.
“This guy is the total package now. He’s the real thing,” Gibson said. “He’s got great parents, a great support system. There’s never any issues.”