Merced Bears

The Merced Bears, based in Merced, California, were a charter member of the California League, founded in 1941 as a Class C circuit, and were fittingly a farm club of the Boston Bees, as the Boston Braves were then briefly known. Merced was the smallest market among the eight founding cities, and the Bears struggled accordingly, finishing last at 50-86, a full 38 games behind pennant-winning Fresno.

That one season was the whole story. When World War II arrived, the league shed half its teams for 1942 and then suspended entirely, and unlike Bakersfield, Fresno, and Stockton, Merced never returned to the league when play resumed in 1946. The Bears remain the only entry in the modern California League's long history to represent the city.

Merced's baseball history did not begin or end there: the city fielded the Merced Fig Growers in the California State League in 1910, a nod to the same agricultural identity that surrounded the Bears three decades later.