Lewis (baseball)

Lewis (baseball)

Lewis played in one career game with the Buffalo Bisons of the Players’ League on July 12, 1890. His earned run average of 60. 00 and walks plus hits per inning pitched rate of 6. 667 became the highest in the history of the PL. The PL was formed by the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players in November 1889, after a dispute over pay with the National League.

About Lewis (baseball) in brief

Summary Lewis (baseball)Lewis played in one career game with the Buffalo Bisons of the Players’ League on July 12, 1890. After asking the Bisons manager for a tryout and pitching three innings, his earned run average of 60. 00 and walks plus hits per inning pitched rate of 6. 667 became the highest in the history of the PL. The PL was formed by the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players in November 1889, after a dispute over pay with the National League and American Association. After the season, the PL folded and teams either merged with the NL, joined the AA, or folded outright. Lewis’s statistics do not qualify for rate comparison among players on the baseball statistics reference site Baseball-Reference. As of August 2020, Lewis’s first name, date of birth, and batting and pitching stances are unknown. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and played for the Brooklyn Ward’s Wonders. The Bisons lost, 28–16; the total of 44 runs set a record for most runs scored in an MLB game that stood until 1922. In the third inning Lewis allowed two home runs to Lou Bierbauer: this was only the second time a batter in a major league game had hit two home Runs in a single inning.

The NL had implemented a reserve clause in 1879, which limited the ability of players to negotiate across teams for their salaries, and both the AA and NL had passed a salary cap of US$2,000 per player in 1885, equivalent to USD 50,156 in 2019. The club owners agreed to remove the salary cap in 1887, but reneged on their promise, and instead instituted a “classification system” which limited players’ salaries based on their classification on a scale from A–E, with the highest-paid players being the highest. The Brotherhood, which had 107 players in 1886, announced its intention to leave the NL on November 4, 1889. After being advised by Brotherhood lawyers not to incorporate before each individual team incorporated, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh were the first teams to join the PL for the 1890 season. Despite falling to 17th place in the league by May 17, 1890, Buffalo had fallen to last place on the last day of the league’s first season. In 1968, the MLB’s Special Records Committee determined the PL was a “major league” for official statistical purposes.