Cleveland Public Library: The Mears Collection

Charles Willard Mears is best known today for the Mears Collection of baseball materials. These materials range from a complete run of Spalding Guides from before the turn of the century to a set of 41 scrapbooks which consist of box scores, articles and clippings from 1853 to 1941. The collection is wide-ranging. One can find 21 volumes of Beadle’s Base Ball Player, 18 issues of DeWitt’s Baseball Guide, Our Boys Base Ball Rules, Napoleon Lajoie’s Ball Guide, and two editions of Spalding’s Base Ball Guide in Spanish!

The 41 scrapbooks are the heart of the Mears’ Collection. They have not yet been fully analyzed and cataloged. The scrapbooks are extremely interesting in appearance. For the most part, Mears did not use blank sheets to paste his scores and articles; Mears used clean sides in bound volumes of correspondence to magazines of the ‘teens and twenties for which Mears handled advertising.

In all, the Mears’ collection, which was donated to the Cleveland Public Library in September 1944, two years after Mears’ death, consists of 468 volumes. In addition to book material, approximately 800 photographs were donated. The Library has added many other baseball items over the years: biographies, yearbooks, annuals, media guides, and statistical sources. Not all of the Mears’ material is bound. In addition to the photographs, the Library has several envelopes of unbound clippings including a whole series of nineteenth-century articles on the curve ball and a large and varied collection of baseball poetry including many uncollected parodies of “Casey at the Bat” and “Hiawatha.”

To understand the eclectic nature of the Collection, one has to examine the man. In his life, Charles Mears excelled in two different, though related, fields: sportswriting and advertising. Mears was born in Monroeville, Ohio on June 23, 1874. He attended school in Norwalk and moved to Cleveland with his family in 1885. Mears was a confirmed baseball fan in his teens and tried to improve his access to ball games by serving as a stringer for The Sporting News. Mears’ other athletic passion was bicycling and Mears became the first chief counsel of the Ohio Division of the League of American Wheelmen and then editor of the Cycling Gazette. At the turn of the century, Mears turned from bicycles to automobiles and wrote for the Motor Vehicle Review. He moved on to establish the Daily Legal News. Mears was named sports editor of the Cleveland Press in 1902. He held the post for less than two years, but during this brief span, Mears had begun collection baseball material

Cleveland was one of the pivotal cities in the early years of automobile manufacturing, and the Winton Engine Co. was one of Cleveland’s most prominent automobile manufacturers. In 1903, Mears joined the Winton organization as editor of its house organ, the Auto Era. By this time Mears had studied law and had recently passed the Ohio Bar. Mears rose rapidly with Winton, however, and shortly after that he became their advertising manager, the first man to hold that post in the automobile industry. Mears was with Winton until 1920. Apparently Mears had a difference of opinion with Winton management over the potential market for the Winton. Mears believed strongly that players the company should put out an inexpensive car to compete with Ford’s “tin lizzie”. The company considered their product as strictly a luxury item. Winton was out of the automobile business by 1922.

Mears started the Cleveland Advertising School, under the auspices of the Cleveland Advertising Club, in 1918. He served as president of the Club in 1920 and 1921. Mears achieved great distinction in the advertising field. He organized the firm of Mears, Richardson & Briggs, a consulting firm located in the Keith Building from 1921 to 1929. A 1929 Cleveland Press article lists Mears as one of Cleveland’s nationally known figures along with O.P. and M.J. Van Sweringen, Newton D. Baker, George Crile, and Cyrus Eaton. He wrote extensively; among his best known works are “The Big Merchant’s Problem” and “Salesmanship for the New Era.”

Another one of Mears’ publications is “Here’s Something New – High Spots in Baseball,” a compendium of fielding statistics from 1871 to 1918. In addition to figures on putouts, assists, and errors, Mears also includes leaders in total chances per game. This last computation is roughly equivalent to “range factor,” a much beloved measure to sabermetricians. Mears had a great affinity for baseball statistics. In 1924, Mears published a daily column during the baseball season spotlighting a historical event, a forerunner of “This Day in Baseball History.”   Mears seems to have been a compulsive compiler of numbers. 

In the Mears’ files of the library, there is a folder with all sorts of figures: most total bases in one game, teams which scored in every inning, hitting for the cycle, consecutive pitching wins, and many others. Included in this file is correspondence with Ernest Lanigan, the “patron saint of sabermetrics”, in which Lanigan asks Mears for advice and information. Interestingly, a surviving list of members of the Baseball Writers Association of America from 1935 lists both Mears and Lanigan as being affiliated with the Cleveland News. Mears was listed as advertising counselor of the News in the 1920s. Mears covered the World Series for several years as a syndicated reporter whose statistical analysis of the championship games appeared coast to coast. He had acquired the nickname of “Old Doc Statistics”. All this time Mears was augmenting his collection of baseball publications. He had accumulated over 250,000 box scores and claimed to have every major league box scores in his collection. In a 1979 Plain Dealer article by Joe Maxse, Emerson Mears, the sole surviving son of Charles Mears at that time, recalls pasting magazine and newspaper clippings in scrapbooks. In the same article Emerson Mears stated that his father had purchased the largest portion of his collection for “eight or nine thousand dollars” from an unknown collector. In a 1939 letter, Mears indicated that he bought the Tim Murnane library and that of William M. Rankin, baseball editor of the New York Clipper.

As early as 1935, Charles Mears expressed an interest in selling his collection. The last seven years of this life was spent in a pursuit of this sale which would eventually prove fruitless. The Cleveland Public Library has a file of the correspondence pertaining to the sale of the baseball collection. In that file are letters to and from some of the leading names in baseball’s front offices in the late thirties and early forties. Mears offered the collection to Larry MacPhail of the Brooklyn Dodgers using Ed Bang of the Cleveland News as an intermediary:

…I am confident he would sell it for $15,000 and it would be a better investment than club owners make in players on occasions. This would be a lasting testimonial to a man who had the foresight of purchasing it so as to be in the position of answering any question that might come up in baseball from the date of its birth.

MacPhail was unable to meet the price. Neither was Walter O. Briggs of the Detroit Tigers who Mears approached through H.G. Salsinger. Mears offered the collection to the fledgling Baseball Hall of Fame as early as 1937, but in a letter from Alexander Cleland, secretary of the Hall, Mears is informed that all of the Hall’s funds were involved in the erection of the Hall of Fame building. Five years later, Mears explored the possibility of donating his collection to the Hall. There was apparently some dispute over the recognition that Mears would receive and the deal fell through. 

Mears offered the collection to W.G. Branham, the price down to $6,000, but the price was still prohibitive to Branham. Mears offered the collection to Henry and Edsel Ford for Greenfield Village at the same price but received no reply. Mears ran an ad in The Sporting News in February 1940. Mears received several replies, one from as far away as Panama, but he was unwilling to break up the collection. Mears’ last and most involved campaign was to sell the collection to the Samuel Goldwyn studios in connection with their production of Pride of the Yankees. Mears approached the studio through Christy Walsh, who was acting as technical advisor and handling some of the publicity. Mears even prepared a script to be used as a prologue for the film in which Goldwyn would present the baseball collection he purchased to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia as the Lou Gehrig Memorial Library.

Mayor: Now that you have in our studios all the box scores of the games Lou played, what are you going to do with them?

Mr. G(oldwyn): I want to consult you on that, Mr. Mayor. Suppose that all the box scores of the 130,000 big league games played since they began in 1871 were to be gathered into a single library. These could be preserved as long as the English language is read —- a complete playing record of every player who participated in any of these games — even the player who played only a single inning — the true day-to-day playing history of big league baseball, assembled for the first time in one place and open to everybody who loves base ball and admires its players. Would this be worth while?

Mayor:  Excellent, Mr. Goldwyn. Can your do it?  Will you do it?  I wish you would.

Mr. G.: I waited only your approval, Mr. Mayor. Now I can say this: We have done it.

The Goldwyn Studios also declined.

Mears stated two reasons for wishing to dispose of his collection. First, Mears and his wife Blanche wished to move to a smaller place, and most importantly Mears began to experience ill health. His obituaries mentioned that he had undergone an operation several years before and had continued to suffer its effects. A letter to Mears from Christy Walsh also inquired into the condition of Mears’ health. 

Nevertheless, Mears remained active in the Advertising Club and was serving as information officer for the War Production Board when he died on December 9, 1942 in Charity Hospital. Mears was buried in Lake View Cemetery. His obituaries barely mentioned his baseball connection, concentrating on his feats in advertising. He was named to the national Advertising Hall of Fame in 1968. Yet it was his baseball scholarship and the baseball collection which still bears his name which recall him almost fifty years after his death.