St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, August 3, 1909

The above is a special design of eyeglasses for the use of policemen looking for lid-lifters.

At the time there were a lot of Sunday “blue laws” (religion-based laws that prohibited a lot of things, mostly drinking, prostitution and gambling, but also stuff like playing baseball). You were supposed to “keep a lid on it” on Sundays. If you weren’t, you were a “lid-lifter”. It came to mean someone or a group of somebodies who were attempting to circumvent “dry” laws in general, not just Sundays, whether that was with legally through legislature or illegally with bootlegging, secretly keeping your saloon open when it shouldn’t be or just drinking. On the other hand, it sometimes meant someone on the side of the law who was trying to uncover unseemly things, sort of like a muckraker.

Around the 20s there was a popular burlesque group who called themselves the Lid Lifters. I think more recently (from the 30s forward at any rate) it’s been used to describe the opening game of a baseball or other sports season.