Meet Baseball Fantasy Camp Great Jerry Lewis

Meet Baseball Fantasy-Maker Jerry Lewis

His camp is the longest-standing one in the game

Courtesy Rick Dupler/Captured Expressions Like a lot of other kids, Jerry Lewis grew up worshipping in the house of baseball. He hit stickball on the streets and against brick walls in Detroit. Shagged fly balls in any field he could find. Watched his favorite team, the Detroit Tigers and dreamed of one day playing for them. Then reality hit. “It was fairly obvious around age 12 that I was running behind in terms of athletic ability,” he says. “It just wasn't going to be my profession.” He made his field of dreams come true anyway. Since 1996, Lewis, 74, has been the full-time overseer, organizer and director of a fantasy camp for the Tigers. Not mosquitoes and bonfires, mind you, just plenty of sun and fun and high heat. For one week during the dead of winter, almost 200 men — and women! — head to Florida to dress in personalized big-league uniforms, eat in the same cafeteria, drink the same beer and play games on the same fields with their baseball heroes day and night. It's as close as any non-athletic mortal can get to entering the Hall of Fame. Almost every team in Major League Baseball features a fantasy camp now, but his creation is the longest-standing one in the game. In fact, executives from nearly every team ranging from the Pittsburgh Pirates to the Toronto Blue Jays have contacted Lewis for advice. “The key to my success is that I think like the customer,” he says. “If I weren't putting it together then I'd go myself just to meet all these guys. There's no other place where you can feel like you're a part of a team like this and rub elbows with players. I fell head over heels in love with this starting at day one.” That would date back to 1983. At the time, Lewis was a manufacturer's representative for Members Only jackets and trying to sell the popular outerwear to local department stores and mom-and-pop men's shops. He was, for all intents and purposes, a traveling salesman. “I was working strictly for commission and didn't have insurance or a paycheck,” he recalls. Then he read an issue of the Sporting News and came across a small article about how the Chicago Cubs was starting something called a fantasy camp in Arizona. Intrigued, he called the Cubs but got no information. Instead, he took charge and decided to reach out to a former Detroit Tiger named Jim Price — the two once worked together at a gas company in the early 1970s — and ran the idea past him. They got permission from the Tigers front office and launched the first fantasy camp in Lakeland, Florida (where the team plays spring training) in 1984. “It was really an experiment because we were really flying by the seat of our pants on it,” he admits. Admission was $4 and the cost to play was $2,000. A whopping 86 people signed up to play alongside local stars from the 1960s and 1970s. There was so much fanfare that the camp was covered by a new cable network called ESPN. The first event was, well, a grand slam. Soon after, Lewis got a call from New York Yankees great Whitey Ford because he and Mickey Mantle wanted to run the same program for the pinstripes. ("I almost fell off my chair!") He continued to hawk jackets by day and run the annual fantasy camp in his off-time. But business was slowing with the advent of the internet and so, in 1996, he devoted himself full-time to baseball. He was 52. “Thank goodness the Tigers gave me that opportunity,” he says. “I did the best I could with clothing, but I didn't know stitch counts or anything about fashion except that a zipper went up and down. But baseball, my god, I know the starting lineup for the 1954 Detroit Tigers!" The Detroit-based Lewis has since grown the business into summer camps and first pitch opportunities and golf outings and cruises. He's also directed 62 weeks’ worth of fantasy camps with number 63 coming in early 2020. Ever hands-on, he refuses to take on an administrative team and assistance, minus a secretary. And though he loves his wife of 30 years and spending time with his grown daughter and four grandchildren, he has no desire to retire. “It's obvious if anybody knows me or talks to me that this is not something I'm going to want to give up,” he says. Besides, why give up something that makes you feel like a kid at heart? “Hanging around young people and doing things that young people do is good for my body and my soul,” he says. “I really love what I do, and loving what you do is the secret to happiness."

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