10 fun facts about AL ROY Kyle Lewis

SEATTLE -- Mariners center fielder Kyle Lewis was unanimously named the American League Rookie of the Year on Monday in voting results announced by the Baseball Writers' Association of America. Here are 10 fun facts about the 25-year-old.

• Kyle Lewis unanimously crowned AL ROY

1. Lewis was the first player drafted by general manager Jerry Dipoto after Dipoto took over the Mariners baseball operations in September of 2015.

2. Lewis was a basketball and baseball standout at Shiloh High School in Snellville, Ga., before playing three years of baseball at Mercer University, a private school in Macon, Ga., that has since doubled its enrollment to about 8,000. He was the first athlete from Mercer ever selected in the first round of the MLB, NFL or NHL Drafts.

3. The 6-foot-4 Lewis was something of a late bloomer in baseball. He was undrafted out of high school and never played summer baseball until prior to his senior year at Shiloh, focusing instead on basketball.

4. Lewis broke a rough run for the Mariners when they landed him with the No. 11 pick in the 2016 Draft. Seattle had top-12 selections in five of the previous six Drafts, tabbing Dustin Ackley, Danny Hultzen, Mike Zunino, D.J. Peterson and Alex Jackson. But none of those are still with the Mariners now, and Hultzen, Peterson and Jackson never reached the Majors with the Mariners.

5. Lewis never took an at-bat at the Triple-A level, instead being promoted straight from Double-A Arkansas to the big league club.

6. As a September callup in 2019, Lewis’ first hit was a home run in his Major League debut off the Reds’ Trevor Bauer, who is one of the National League Cy Young Award finalists this season.

7. Lewis hit home runs in each of his first three games in the Majors -- joining the Rockies’ Trevor Story as the only players in MLB history to achieve that feat -- and then became the only player ever to homer in six of his first 10 games.

8. Lewis started fast again in 2020, homering in his first at-bat of the season, this time off 2019 AL Cy Young Award winner Justin Verlander of the Astros on Opening Day, and added another home run the following night to become one of just 13 MLB players ever to go deep eight times in their first 20 career games.

9. Lewis is the first Mariner to win AL Rookie of the Year honors since Ichiro Suzuki in 2001, and he’s the fourth overall, along with Kazuhiro Sasaki in ‘00 and Alvin Davis in 1984.

• All-time Rookie of the Year winners

10. Lewis, who suffered a major knee injury just 30 games into his pro career in 2016, has shown far more power in the Majors than he did in the Minor Leagues, where he totaled 30 home runs and a .260/.334/.417 slash line in 287 games over four years. That’s compared to 17 homers and a .264/.347/.477 line so far in 76 games in the big leagues.