(Picture: Despite playing in this pitcher-friendly ball field, Brett A. Lewis still gave up 60 earned runs against 101 innings pitched in his one season of professional baseball.)
To read a full explanation of why a scribe of my kind would waste his time writing pieces on the Brett Lewis' who have played professional baseball, and to view the first installment of my series of baseball appreciative pieces, click HERE.
Brett A. Lewis was a special ballplayer to me. Of all the baseball players who have ever played America's pastime and earned some compensation for laboring at the game, he's only one of two who share my first name, last name, and middle initial.1 The Legend of Brett A. Lewis is unassailable.
Brett A. Lewis was birthed into this world on April 11, 1979. It was the same day that Eddie Wilson died – this is of little note to the casual baseball fan as Mr. Wilson played in only parts of two seasons for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1930s, accumulating 72 hits, 39 runs, 12 doubles, 2 triples and 4 home runs, but I'm sure his death was a big deal to his family.
However, the death and birth of these two men are relevant to baseball fans and pocket-book philosophers as it illustrates that the cycle of baseball life is never ending. As Wilson was exiting the world, another kind-of-good baseball player was entering it.
Brett A. Lewis was born in Douglasville, Georgia – the same city where just-good-enough-to-smell-success Major League Baseball players Terry Harper and Camp Skinner were born.
It's easy to imagine Brett A. Lewis, who may have been raised in a modest home 20 miles west of Atlanta, dreaming of growing up to be a professional baseball player. He probably picked peaches in the hot Georgia summers of the mid-to-late 1980s to earn some walking-around money while conjuring up imagines Ty Cobb, perhaps Georgia's greatest and most notorious baseball player. With Cobb in mind, he very likely sharpened his spikes and slid aggressively feet first into opposing defenders during his little league and high school baseball careers.
Everyday life in Douglasville was no breeze. When his family ran low on firewood – the family did not have central heating as Douglasville has never fully recovered from Sherman's March to the Sea – Brett A. Lewis would chop away at a ponderosa pine behind the family homestead, taking cuts like he was Atlanta Braves great David Justice until it fell. The offerings from the mighty ponderosas kept the Lewis family warm through the winters. The storms that would ravish and rage through Dixie Alley did little to stunt Brett A. Lewis' growth as a ballplayer. He only grew stronger as he erected 10-foot-high sandbag walls around the family homestead and dug a 10-foot deep basement to protect his kin folk from hurricane flooding and tornados, respectively.2
When Brett A. Lewis arrived at Georgia Southern University for his freshman year, he probably did not know whether he would fit in so far from home. Brett A. Lewis had neither been further east than Atlanta, nor further west than Talladega, Alabama.3 He simply did not know whether he would mix well with the sophisticated folks from Statesboro, Georgia – many of whom traced their linage to old estates in Savannah, Georgia.
Brett A. Lewis would blossom into a pitching prospect. By his senior year, Brett A. Lewis had a WHIP of 1.29 and a 4.07 ERA while accumulating 11 wins to 6 losses as he led the Eagles to a Southern Conference Championship and into the College Baseball World Series. Two of Brett A. Lewis' teammates would become major league pitchers – Dennis Dove (3 total innings pitched for St. Louis in 2007); and Brian Rogers (who gave up a symmetrical 11 earned runs for 11 innings pitched in two strange years with the Pittsburg Pirates).
The Big Leagues were not in the cards for Brett A. Lewis. He was drafted in the 2002 amateur draft by the Chicago Cubs in the 29th round as the 873rd overall pick. He did not see action at even the rookie-league level, but instead played two seasons for the Evansville Otters in the Frontier League.
The Evansville Otters play their games in the third-oldest professional baseball field. Bosse Field, located in Evansville, Indiana, was constructed in 1915. The field boasts the fact that it's the first municipally-owned athletic facility in the United States as the stadium was originally built as a School Board Project. Eugene V. Debs, the legendary American socialist who ran for president, may have been proud of such socialism projects in his home state in the early 20th Century.4 The mayor of Evansville at the time, and the namesake of the field, Benjamin Bosse, gave something of a socialist quote to commemorate the building of the stadium, "When everybody boosts, everybody wins."5
However, just as Evansville became more conservative over the years,6 so too did its reception of hard-working, country-strong, classic ballplayers. Brett A. Lewis struggled. He started 13 games his first season, going 4-5 with a 5.10 ERA and a 1.69 WHIP. In his second season, Brett A. Lewis played in only six games, going 1-2 with a 5.90 ERA and a 1.59 WHIP, before calling it quits.7
While Brett A. Lewis probably could have stuck around in the independent leagues longer, it was probably time for him return to Douglasville, Georgia, where the peaches grew large, the Spring air tasted like gin and tonic, and the women called their men honey.
1. Stay tuned for the other Brett A. Lewis to play professional baseball in another installment of this intrepid blog.
2. As if it need be said, this entire paragraph is purely speculative to the highest degree.
3. Again, this entire paragraph was probably made up: When young Brett A. Lewis was 17 years old, he may have been lucky enough to win tickets at the Douglas County Fair to the Talladega-500 NASCAR race where he saw Jeff Gordon win a race that Dale Earnhardt really should have won.
4. Indeed, the city of Evansville, Indiana, may have been full of progressives in the early 20th century. By popular accounts, the first famous jewish baseball player and baseball hall of famer Hank Greenberg played for the Evansville Hubs in 1931 before moving on to the Detroit Tigers of the major leagues. It was a time when anti-semitism was not uncommon in America.
5. However, perhaps this concept of economics works projects has become bastardized by the NFL extortionists who put pressure on American cities to build new stadiums today.
6. Evansville, Indiana's house of representative delegate is Larry Bucshon, who is, inter alia, for lowering corporate taxes – very unlike Mr. Debs.
7. The Otters are good enough to list an all-time roster, which, like this blog, forever commemorating Brett A. Lewis' professional baseball career.
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