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by Society for American Baseball Research ( (Author)
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 shared accomplishment together. Those are the bare bones of how a photo that retains its power and meaning more than three quarters of a century later came into being. But what if it's more complicated than that? What if that image had been staged? Would that dilute its significance?
"MLB Clubs on Lake Erie During the Late Nineteenth Century" by Woody Eckard
Many historians assign the 1884 Toledo club a special place in baseball history as the first MLB team with a black player, six decades before the Brooklyn Dodger's Jacky Robinson in 1947. Moses Fleetwood Walker was the first string catcher for the first half of the season, playing openly as a Black man, and appearing in 42 Toledo games in his only MLB season. However other baseball historians suggest William White as a possible candidate. At age 18 and while a member of the Dartmouth College nine, his only MLB appearance was in a single home game for the nearby 1879 NL Providence club as a fill-in for an injured regular player. He apparently lived his life "passing" as a White man, a fact discovered in the twenty-first century. There is no evidence that anyone present at his sole MLB game was aware that he was Black.
"Bob Feller, the Johnny Appleseed of Home Run Derbies" by Larry DeFillipo
During baseball season, Bob Feller made it his business to visit dozens of minor-league ballparks, spending time at some for what were variously called "pitching demonstrations," "home run hitting contests" or "pitching exhibitions." Just as Johnny Appleseed wore a trademark tin hat when spreading seeds (or so the urban legend says), so too was Feller garbed in familiar togs during those events, which can collectively be called home run derbies. With few exceptions, Feller wore an Indians uniform bearing the number 19 that he wore throughout his storied career. Unlike All-Star Game home run derbies that 21st-century fans are familiar with, Feller's minor-league derbies took place before regular season games, in front of crowds that often numbered in the hundreds. Batters have been the featured attraction at home run derbies since the term first came into use, but Feller turned that convention on its head. He was the draw for most of the home run derbies that he pitched in. Indeed, many of his derbies were the centerpiece of "Bob Feller Night" promotions.
