The National Pastime, 2026

The 2026 edition of The National Pastime brings us to the shores of Lake Erie, as SABR's national convention visits Cleveland for the first time since 2008.

In addition to historical looks at Cleveland teams such as the nineteenth century Blues and Spiders and the Negro Leagues Cleveland Buckeyes, we examine Telling's Strollers, an amateur team that drew a reported 91,000 fans to a single game.

Articles also range around the Great Lake, from the Canadian side to the PONY League, and to Toledo for a piece on Jim Weber, longtime voice of the Mudhens.

On the contemporary side, this issue also includes analyses of home runs at Progressive Field and the recent game-fixing gambling scandal. "The Staging of One of Baseball's Most Famous Images" by Luke Epplin On October 9, 1948, the Cleveland Indians, up two games to one in a tightly contested World Series against the Boston Braves, turned to a spare part in their pitching rotation.

Even though it'd been three weeks since Steve Gromek had last started, in Game Four he matched Braves ace Johnny Sain pitch for pitch. It wouldn't have been enough if another unlikely player hadn't bailed him out.

In the third inning Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League, someone who hadn't even been slated to crack the Indians' roster coming out of spring training, roped a Sain curveball over the chain-link fence in right field at Cleveland Stadium, granting Gromek a two-run cushion--just enough for him to cruise to a 2-1 victory.

In the Indians clubhouse afterward, Gromek, the son of Polish immigrants from Hamtramck, Michigan, sought out Doby, the descendant of enslaved ancestors from Camden, South Carolina. Newspaper photographers snapped an image of the two locked in a cheek-to-cheek embrace, their eyes nearly shut in ecstasy.

The following morning the picture ran on front pages across a country still beset with segregation, the first image that many Americans would've seen of white and Black colleagues celebrating a sha