Editor’s Note: The National Pastime 2026
This article was written by Vince Guerrieri
This article was published in The National Pastime: Baseball on Lake Erie (2026)
If you want to write about baseball history, there are far worse wells from which to draw than Cleveland.
The city’s first professional baseball team, the Forest Citys, started in 1869. The city is best known for the team now called the Guardians, a charter member of the American League in 1901, but over the years, it’s also been home to teams in the National League (the Spiders), the Players’ League (the Infants), the minor-league Federal League (the Green Sox) and the Negro Leagues (many teams, but most notably the Buckeyes). It’s even been home to a vibrant local amateur baseball scene, with record-setting crowds and notable semi-pro teams earning it the nickname of the Sandlot Capital of the World.
This year’s edition of The National Pastime talks about some of those amateur teams and one of its most notable venues, Brookside Park, as well as the American League’s prehistory and early years and the current Cleveland major league team, from its early days as the Blues to its time as the Indians to today’s Guardians.
But we wanted to go farther than that for this year’s edition. That’s why this year’s theme is “Baseball on Lake Erie.” The history of the Great Lakes is intertwined with the history of baseball—in no small part because the Great Lakes gave rise to many of the nation’s great midwestern cities. The game has been played in Toledo and western New York dating back to the nineteenth century, and one of the pieces in this year’s edition talks about the roots of baseball in Ontario, which could go back almost as far as the origin of the game itself.
At one point or another, many of baseball’s all-time greats—and all-time great characters—played baseball in Cleveland and around Lake Erie. Before Randy Johnson started the first game at Jacobs (now Progressive) Field, he was a minor leaguer in Western New York. Indians Hank Helf and Frankie Pytlak set world records—by catching balls dropped from the Terminal Tower! Bob Feller became an institution in Cleveland—and took his show on the road during and after his playing days. Luke Easter was an outsized character in Western New York who met a tragic end just outside of Cleveland, while Roger Maris remains one of the great what-ifs in Cleveland baseball history. All are parts of stories in this edition.
So, on behalf of editor Liz Roscher, publications director Cecilia Tan, and myself, I’d like to welcome you to this edition of The National Pastime. I hope you learn as much as we did compiling it, and I hope it’s an enjoyable read.
— Vince Guerrieri
July 2026
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