Fresno Raisin Growers

The Fresno Raisin Growers, based in Fresno, California, played the 1909 season in the California League, during the era when the circuit operated as an independent "outlaw" league outside Organized Baseball. The name was no invention: Fresno was then, as now, the raisin capital of the world, and the club followed the 1908 Fresno Tigers as the city's entry in the league's final season before it folded under pressure from the Pacific Coast League.

Fresno had already tasted the higher circuit. In 1906 the Tacoma Tigers of the Pacific Coast League relocated mid-existence to become the Fresno Raisin Eaters for a single season, and the city later fielded California State League clubs in 1910 and 1913 before settling into its long run in the modern California League beginning in 1941.

In the first half of the 1900s, professional baseball reached into towns of every size across America, with leagues rising and folding year to year as cities looked for entertainment in the era before television. The early California League circuits were among the most colorful of these, and few team names anywhere captured a local economy as plainly as the Raisin Growers.