Merced Fig Growers

The Merced Fig Growers, based in Merced, California, played in the California State League in 1910, arriving mid-season when the Oakland Invaders franchise relocated to the San Joaquin Valley. The name saluted the fig orchards then spreading across Merced County, part of the great agricultural boom that gave the early California minors some of the best team names ever recorded: the Fig Growers joined the Raisin Growers, Prune Pickers, and Melon Rollers in a league that read like a farmers market.

The Fig Growers were Merced's first professional baseball team, and their single partial season stood as the city's only professional baseball until the Merced Bears joined the new California League as a charter member in 1941. Between the two clubs, Merced's entire professional baseball history spans parts of just two seasons, three decades apart, under two agricultural names.

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, and the 1910 California State League was among the many circuits that didn't survive their own ambitions.