“My dad was a giant Lakers fan,” Kobe Shaquille Robinson advised me, indulging an admittedly apparent query. Robinson was born in 2001, in the course of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal’s three-NBA-championship run. However he found early on that his title couldn’t assist him shoot a basketball. As an athlete, he stood out on the pitcher’s mound.
Robinson is 6 foot 2 and lanky; once we met, he was sporting his hair in two-strand twists. We had been speaking on a Saturday afternoon in Memphis, in a retro-style downtown stadium named after an auto-parts chain. It was, in a manner, the proper venue for a dialog with an up-and-coming ballplayer—a minor-league park with all of the trimmings of a major-league one. It was additionally, objectively talking, an uncommon office for a Black athlete in 2026.
Again within the mid-Eighties, through the prime of Ozzie Smith, Rickey Henderson, Tony Gwynn, and Dwight Gooden, greater than 18 p.c of Main League Baseball gamers had been Black. Now that determine is slightly below 7 p.c—proper round the place it was in 1956, lower than a decade after Jackie Robinson broke the colour line.
No single purpose explains Black Individuals’ diminished footprint within the sport; the excessive value of apparatus and journey ball, dwindling municipal funding for youth leagues, the rise of the NFL and the NBA, and a parallel surge of Latino expertise have all contributed. Regardless of these elements, Kobe Robinson nonetheless dreamed of a life in baseball. “I simply felt like the person on the market,” he stated. “So I caught with it.”
Robinson’s fastball, which earned him the nickname “Scorching Sauce,” carried him from a Tennessee group school to the 2021 MLB draft, the place he was chosen by the San Diego Padres. Accidents, nonetheless, stymied his early profession: He had points together with his elbow, then his shoulder. In 2024, the Padres launched him. The closest he ever obtained to the massive present was A‑ball, three rungs beneath the majors.
At 23, Robinson was out of baseball and, he stated, “in a darkish house.” He took in a single day caregiving shifts at a gaggle dwelling, delivered packages for Amazon, and looked for a strategy to get again on the sphere. Final fall, after a 12 months on the sidelines, he discovered a possible opening: The Savannah Bananas had been hiring.
Over the previous three-plus years, the Bananas have gone from a baseball curiosity to a cultural juggernaut. The crew excursions the nation taking part in what it calls Banana Ball: a family-friendly, souped-up, TikTok-ready model of the nationwide pastime. Video games function singing and dancing and movie star cameos, plus backflipping outfielders, stilt-walking batters, and the occasional double to the hole. Final 12 months, in line with the group’s personal knowledge, the Bananas and their affiliated groups bought 2.2 million tickets—greater than 11 totally different MLB franchises.
The Bananas are incessantly in comparison with the Harlem Globetrotters. However in contrast to their basketball counterparts, who ritually defeat the rival Washington Generals, the Bananas don’t script the outcomes of their video games. They play towards—and typically lose to—a rotating band of groups with their very own personalities and followings. Amongst their opponents are the denim-clad Texas Tailgaters, the often-shirtless Get together Animals, and the Firefighters, who make their entrance in full firefighting uniforms, as if to douse an inferno in proper area.
Robinson stuffed out a Potential Banana Ball Participant type and obtained invited to audition for a roster spot. He knew from a former teammate who performed for the Firefighters that this might not be a standard tryout. “I didn’t wish to go dressed as only a baseball participant, as a result of that’s not what they search for,” he stated. As a substitute, he went as Frozone, the Incredibles character voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. “It appeared type of goofy,” he stated of his blue-and-white bodysuit. “However I stated, I don’t care. I’m going on the market, and I’m pitching.” On this context, pitching meant doing a synchronized twirl together with his infielders, then firing a fastball throughout dwelling plate.
The scouts preferred what they noticed. A month later, Robinson was drafted by one in every of two enlargement groups making their Banana Ball debut in 2026: the Indianapolis Clowns.
In contrast to the opposite groups within the prolonged Bananas universe, the Clowns should not an authentic creation. They had been a actual baseball franchise that competed within the Negro Leagues; in 1952, they signed a teenage prospect named Hank Aaron. Just like the Bananas, they had been additionally an leisure act. The Clowns traveled with acrobats, a “one-man jazz band” referred to as Boogie Woogie Paul, and an precise circus clown. A number of the solely present footage of the unique Clowns exhibits the long-limbed first baseman Reece “Goose” Tatum, who additionally performed for the Globetrotters, dropping to his knees as if to hope for a base hit and getting woke up from a fainting spell by a smelly foot.
Jesse Cole, the 42-year-old impresario behind the Bananas, has stated that relaunching the Clowns is a strategy to honor one in every of Banana Ball’s forebears and protect the legacy of the Negro Leagues. Robinson was thrilled. The Clowns “paved this manner for us,” he advised me. “Now now we have to carry it again to this point in time and make it even higher.” The Clowns additionally present a chance to extend Black illustration in baseball. Robinson, who feared that his profession was over, now has one other shot.
However the resolution to revive the Indianapolis Clowns isn’t as simple as it could appear. Though the crew’s antics had been broadly fashionable, they might additionally descend into racial caricature. The Clowns rankled each their Negro Leagues friends and Black sportswriters, chief amongst them Wendell Smith. The influential Pittsburgh Courier columnist referred to as the crew a “fourth-rate ‘Uncle Tom’ minstrel present.” He additionally accused the crew’s white proprietor—who promoted one in every of his star pitchers as baseball’s model of the shuffling, feebleminded minstrel character Stepin Fetchit—of making the most of “the type of nonsense which many white individuals prefer to imagine is typical and attribute of all Negroes.”
The Savannah Bananas have risen to prominence by ostentatiously breaking the foundations. Cole, who’s white, usually talks of his admiration for P. T. Barnum, the brash showman who would do something to draw an viewers. The Bananas’ proprietor rightly intuited that baseball, essentially the most hidebound of American sports activities, didn’t know how you can market itself to a brand new, social-media-enabled technology. Cole makes all of his public appearances in a banana-yellow tuxedo and banana-yellow prime hat; he has made swaggering nonconformity a part of the model. “For those who’re not getting criticized,” he has stated, “you’re taking part in it too secure.”
Resurrecting the Clowns positively isn’t taking part in it secure.
When Bob Kendrick noticed Banana Ball for the primary time, in 2022, he felt like he was watching one thing without delay new and really acquainted. The motion on the sphere was fast-paced and daring, and the followers had been rapt. For Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, in Kansas Metropolis, Missouri, the scene evoked the audacity of preintegration Black baseball—the daring to construct one thing new in opposition to the mainstream.
That Might, Kendrick gave Cole and his gamers a personal tour of the museum as a part of an ESPN documentary collection on the Bananas. Kendrick took the crew to the part that featured the Clowns and advised Cole that he noticed them as an ancestor of the Bananas. “I believe that’s when he had the epiphany that sometime he would carry again the Indianapolis Clowns,” Kendrick advised me.
The Clowns’ revival is a enterprise association: The Negro Leagues museum, which owns the Clowns’ mental property, acquired a payment from the Bananas for the rights to make use of the crew’s title and develop a set of latest logos. The partnership, Kendrick stated, “comes alongside at an ideal time,” as he’s elevating $50 million to construct a 35,000-square-foot museum campus in Kansas Metropolis. Past the money infusion, the Bananas will carry consideration to the Negro Leagues, placing Black baseball historical past in entrance of a probably big viewers.
In a video saying the Clowns’ return, Kendrick supplied a quick lesson on why the crew mattered. He name-checked the luminaries who wore a Clowns uniform: an 18-year-old Hank Aaron, a 60-something Satchel Paige, and the pathbreaking Toni Stone, who grew to become the primary lady to get constant taking part in time for an expert baseball membership when she joined the Clowns in 1953. Kendrick defined that the crew helped popularize “shadow ball,” an elaborate routine through which actual and invisible baseballs are tossed across the infield. And he stated that, till the Clowns folded within the late Eighties, they had been the final crew standing from the Negro Leagues.
Every thing Kendrick stated within the video is true. However that introduction to the Clowns is incomplete. Their full story is one in every of ingenuity and endurance, but in addition exploitation.
The historical past of racial caricature in baseball goes again almost so far as the organized recreation itself. As early because the 1870s, blackface performers started, within the phrases of the historian James E. Brunson III, to “exploit the sport’s profitable prospects.” Many a long time later, a crew referred to as the Zulu Cannibal Giants pushed this minstrel custom to a dreadful excessive, taking the sphere in naked ft and grass skirts with “battle paint” slathered on their our bodies.
The person who created the Cannibal Giants within the Thirties was a former Negro Leagues pitcher. The crew’s Northeast reserving agent was a New Yorker with a background in vaudeville. His title was Syd Pollock, and he would grow to be finest identified for proudly owning one other barnstorming crew: the Ethiopian Clowns. Pollock’s Clowns wore wigs and pancake make-up and performed underneath faux-African pseudonyms equivalent to Abbadaba and Tarzan. In addition they trafficked in humor that was, at finest, minstrel-adjacent.
Richard “King Tut” King, who’d beforehand had a stint with the Cannibal Giants, was the crew’s most distinguished comic. He would emerge from the dugout wanting like an escaped prisoner, or pantomime taking pictures craps earlier than dropping his pants. His essential collaborator on the Clowns was a dwarf often called Spec Bebop. (His actual title was Ralph Bell.) In a single recurring skit, a dentist gag, Tut would place a lit firecracker in Bebop’s mouth.
Within the early Nineteen Forties, Negro Leagues house owners banded collectively to attempt to prohibit their groups from taking part in Pollock’s franchise. The ban proved not possible to implement, although, as a result of the Clowns had been so fashionable—with each white and Black followers—that cash-poor Black-owned golf equipment felt they’d no alternative however to ebook them.
The Negro American League finally eased up on its Clowns ban, admitting them to the league in 1943. The Clowns, for his or her half, promised to lose the make-up and cease calling themselves Ethiopian. The crew, which had been nominally based mostly in Miami, rebranded itself, turning into the Cincinnati Clowns earlier than transferring to Indianapolis. They removed the paint, too, although not instantly. At Howard College’s Moorland-Spingarn Analysis Middle, I discovered a 1945 program touting the Clowns because the “Most Sensational Ball Membership within the World.” Subsequent to that caption was a photograph of 15 males with white clown make-up slathered on their faces.
The Clowns had been at instances aggressive of their new league, however the NAL—and Black baseball as an entire—was quickly decimated by integration. When Main League Baseball plucked away the likes of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, and Roy Campanella within the late Nineteen Forties, Black followers deserted the Negro Leagues en masse.
The Clowns had been higher positioned than their friends to navigate the Negro Leagues’ collapse. That was largely as a result of Pollock had a knack for making his crew the focus. In 1953, the Clowns’ proprietor signed Toni Stone, declaring that baseball was the “newest masculine enterprise to fall earlier than the advance of wearers of skirts and panties.” The crew’s new feminine second baseman was a media and box-office sensation, reviving curiosity in the whole Negro American League. “Give the followers one thing they wish to see,” a triumphant Pollock stated, “they usually’ll come out.”
The growth didn’t final. In his ebook Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Destroy of a Black Establishment, the historian Neil Lanctot writes that crowds dwindled the subsequent season regardless of the Clowns’ addition of two new ladies, Connie Morgan and Mamie “Peanut” Johnson. After the 1954 season, the Clowns left the Negro American League, and a 12 months later, all three feminine pioneers had been out of baseball. As an impartial barnstorming crew, the Clowns returned to their slapstick roots and performed to smaller audiences. One recreation in 1964—estimated attendance: 400 individuals—featured the 4-foot-5 Billy Vaughn taking part in third base in a costume and the primary baseman James “Natureboy” Williams pulling an oar, a golf membership, a model leg, and 4 baseball bats out of his pants.
In 1968, the Clowns reverse-integrated, including their first white participant. By the Eighties, the last decade when the Clowns lastly petered out, the crew’s roster was fully white.
Just a little after 9:30 a.m., three and a half hours earlier than the primary pitch of the brand new Indianapolis Clowns’ Sunday matinee in Memphis, Jackie Bradley Jr. was already on the sphere. His activity that morning in early March was to lock down his half in a mid-game song-and-dance routine. When Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” began booming from the stadium PA, although, he appeared unsure of his strikes. My scouting report: For a dancer, he’s an ideal middle fielder.
The previous Purple Sox star, now 36, was the primary ex–main leaguer to maneuver to Banana Ball full-time. In his Clowns debut, he caught a fly ball behind his again. “I’ve needed to rewire my mind to not simply catch the ball,” he advised me. “Any ball that’s hit to me, I nearly should do a trick play, as a result of they only see me catch it regular, it’s like, Oh, no matter. Do one thing cool.”
Mastery of trick-play concept and method is a job requirement in Banana Ball. “These guys are baseball gamers,” Errick Fox, the crew’s head coach, advised me. “You additionally should flip that swap and be like, Hey guys, you’re performers.”
Fox grew up in Atlanta within the ’90s, when the Braves’ lineup featured Black superstars equivalent to Fred McGriff, David Justice, and Deion Sanders. “At the moment, it was thrilling,” he recalled. “All of us type of gravitated to essentially wish to be like these guys.” Considered one of his first tasks because the Clowns’ coach, he stated, was to “get some Black ballplayers.”
Bradley, who’d made a cameo look with the Bananas in 2025 on the urging of his oldest daughter, was the crew’s prime recruit. The Clowns’ partnership with the Negro Leagues museum performed a job in his resolution to signal on, as did the potential to sway extra Black athletes to get into baseball. As a younger prospect in Virginia, he’d gotten used to being the one Black participant on the sphere. “I loved the those that I used to be round,” he stated, “however I positively needed there to be extra individuals to seem like me.”
A few of Bradley’s new teammates are Banana Ball veterans. Malachi Mitchell advised me that his baseball philosophy is to “play loud”—to run laborious, show his feelings, and attempt to placed on a present. That method didn’t all the time go over nicely in Florida’s youth-baseball scene. He ran throughout “loads of racist individuals,” he stated, and “the phrases they might use are smug or he’s doing an excessive amount of.” For the Savannah Bananas, an excessive amount of was the proper quantity. Mitchell adopted the persona of “Flash Tha Child,” the Bananas’ designated runner, delighting followers together with his pace on the basepaths, simulated banjo taking part in, and willingness to eat a disgusting quantity of fettuccine Alfredo in service of a comedy bit. However as one of many group’s few Black gamers, Mitchell advised me he typically “felt somewhat separated.” When Jesse Cole requested him if he needed to modify to the Clowns, he stated sure instantly. “Now I really feel at dwelling,” he stated.
One other group of Clowns obtained pulled from baseball’s discard pile. When Nick Wilson threw his last pitch in school, he marked what he thought was the tip of his profession by tossing his cleats over a phone wire. Final fall, he was promoting pc gear when he heard a few Banana Ball tryout in Nashville. It was the identical audition the place Kobe Robinson confirmed up in a Frozone costume. Wilson went as a Ninja Turtle.
Wilson advised me his mom hadn’t been certain about the entire Clowns factor—she anxious that the crew’s title may put him in a foul gentle. However the franchise’s connection to the Negro Leagues was significant to him. Wilson’s grandfather James, who died in 2017, performed professional baseball in Houston within the early ’50s, when sports activities had been nonetheless segregated within the metropolis. Now he had the possibility to hold that legacy ahead. “That is historical past,” he advised me. “Why would I not wish to be part of a crew referred to as the Clowns?”
The crew I noticed in March wasn’t fairly full. A month later, the Clowns introduced on Mo’ne Davis, who in 2014 grew to become the primary woman to throw a shutout within the Little League World Collection. Twelve years later, she’s joined the Clowns’ lineage of pioneering Black feminine athletes. In Davis’s inaugural Clowns look, she retired her first batter on a routine grounder to 3rd.
The brand new Clowns aren’t all Black. Among the many crew’s white gamers are the 2 most clownish guys on the roster: 20-year-old Fisher Polydoroff, a multi-instrumentalist magician who’s adopted the persona of a Fifties pitcher named “Ole Knuckles,” and 38-year-old Mat Wolf, a second-generation rodeo clown with a deep repertoire of trick pitches and strategies for dropping his pants. (“You are able to do it rapidly, you are able to do it slowly, you are able to do it with a spin,” he defined to me.)
Saturday night time’s recreation started with a ceremonial weigh-in. Wilson, the Clowns’ contestant, confronted off towards the Get together Animals’ Jake Lialios, a person who (judging by his social-media presence) spends most of his waking hours lined in child oil. Each gamers stood atop a pink scale, then flexed and danced bare-chested. Across the time when an on-field announcer described Wilson as “over six ft of meat,” it dawned on me that AutoZone Park wouldn’t be internet hosting a nuanced colloquy on Black illustration in baseball.
This weekend collection was actually concerning the Get together Animals. They had been the “dwelling crew” in Memphis, which meant the Clowns largely obtained subsumed inside their opponent’s hot-pink-and-glistening-pecs aesthetic. “Because the away crew, we simply don’t have the identical variety of alternatives to share and type of story-tell,” Joe Meyer advised me.
Meyer is the Clowns’ 24-year-old present coordinator—the person chargeable for growing the crew’s feel and appear. “In my position, I’ll say fairly frankly, I believe in some methods we had anticipated—or significantly thought of—an individual of colour for it, and it’s one thing that’s necessary to us, and it’s one thing to speak about,” he stated. Nonetheless, Meyer, who’s white, has the task, and he feels the importance of what he’s being requested to do: “Finally, how we construct this model goes to be how lots of people keep in mind not simply the Clowns, however keep in mind the Negro Leagues.”
Everyday, Meyer produces and directs the Clowns’ in-game leisure. I first noticed him prowling the sphere with a clipboard, watching over the crew’s “Hey Ya!” dance routine. That type of choreographed sequence—what’s identified in Bananaland as an “over-the-top second,” designed to pop stay within the stadium and afterward social media—tends to be a comparatively small-scale manufacturing. The undertaking that’s actually consuming Meyer is the Clowns’ home-team present, which is scheduled to debut in Indianapolis in Might. That would be the time, he stated, when “the total model type of involves life.”
Historically, Banana Ball branding hasn’t been tough to parse. The Get together Animals are social gathering animals. The Firefighters struggle fires. The Loco Seaside Coconuts, this season’s different new crew, are represented by a coconut sporting sun shades.
The Clowns are extra difficult. When Meyer began diving into the franchise’s previous, he found a photograph of the Ethiopian Clowns from their Thirties face-painting period. “You’re like, Whoa,” he stated. “The Clowns title represented one thing loads totally different than we predict it did.”
Early on, when Meyer and his colleagues had been kicking round ideas for the crew, he anxious that they is perhaps veering into whoa territory. He advised me that he wrote up a five-page memo, primarily laying out the distinction between a “minstrel present and the model of at present.” His takeaway: “If we’re tremendous heavy in making these guys seem like clowns, then we’re actually taking part in into this simply damaging a part of the historical past.”
The Clowns’ brand, a pair of massive purple footwear, nods to the circus with out approaching the realm of wigs and face paint. Nonetheless, a crew often called the Clowns that may’t look too clownish presents a advertising and marketing problem. So does the mandate to coach in addition to entertain. “Followers come to Banana Ball video games anticipating the best present in sports activities, and a present that’s greater than only a Negro Leagues historical past night time,” Meyer stated.
In Memphis, the perfect preview of a totally realized Indianapolis Clowns expertise got here throughout pregame introductions. That section started with some musical theater: a tune, “Right here Come the Clowns,” that borrows its tune and pop-history method from Hamilton’s “My Shot.” Written and carried out by the crew’s hosts, Brandon Bomer and Jarius Jones—each younger Black males—it supplies some helpful background for followers who don’t know the crew’s historical past (“We began within the Negro League, when it was laborious, sweat, tears, and blood we bleed”).
When that musical quantity was over, greater than a dozen gamers picked up baseballs and began juggling—for a juggler, Jackie Bradley Jr. can also be an ideal middle fielder—whereas Fisher Polydoroff and Mat Wolf threw pitches forwards and backwards between their legs. The crew then began taking part in shadow ball, with choreography impressed by the unique Clowns’ routine. There was a dive for an invisible grounder, an invisible throw from deep within the gap, and an invisible pop-up that bonked somebody on the top. At one level, everybody began transferring in excessive gradual movement, earlier than rushing up once more. Then the finale: Malachi Mitchell did a backflip, caught an invisible ball at dwelling plate, and—like magic—pulled an actual ball from his glove.
Earlier than the Clowns’ Sunday recreation in Memphis, I began listening to rumors a few particular visitor—a determine from the crew’s previous. Round 11:30 a.m., he confirmed up on the ballpark: a small, skinny man with a slight smile, wearing a navy Notre Dame hoodie and a classic baseball cap embroidered with a purple C.
Reginald Howard first crossed paths with the Clowns within the late Nineteen Forties, when he labored for the crew as a batboy close to his hometown of South Bend, Indiana. A decade later, he grew to become their second baseman. Now, at 91 years previous, he sat within the dugout at AutoZone Park because the modern-day Clowns leaned in shut.
Howard advised them that he was a “disciple” of Rube Foster, the Black baseball legend who based the primary sustained Negro League. He talked about lengthy bus rides and requested in the event that they’d heard of the two-way star Martín Dihigo. (Kobe Robinson stated sure—Dihigo is a playable character within the online game MLB: The Present.) Then Nick Wilson, the pitcher whose grandfather performed in segregated Texas, requested Howard a query: How can we get Black children to come back again to baseball? His reply: You’ve obtained to get them whereas they’re younger.
Howard had just lately revealed a ebook about how baseball misplaced Black youngsters within the first place. When he stepped onto the sphere to get saluted by the sold-out crowd, the PA announcer learn the title in a cheery vibrato: Baseball’s Silent Genocide. I don’t have complete data, however I imagine this was the primary time the phrase genocide was uttered over a loudspeaker at a Banana Ball recreation.
At a Starbucks the subsequent day, Howard handed me a duplicate of his ebook and laid out his thesis. He believes there was a “sordid conspiracy” to protect baseball as a predominantly white sport. Way back to his childhood, Black children had been advised—and lots of got here to imagine—“this malarkey” that they had been higher outfitted for sports activities aside from baseball. He additionally watched assets shift towards all-white suburbs whereas they vanished in America’s internal cities. Lots of the Black gamers who did stick to baseball ended up profoundly remoted. Within the worst case, he wrote, “you start to assume there’s one thing incorrect with you” only for liking the sport.
The variety of Black gamers in Main League Baseball rose for many years after integration. However that progress finally stalled, then reversed. The historian Louis Moore has proven that at baseball’s decrease ranges, Black expertise was dwindling way back to the early Seventies. Moore doesn’t name this a conspiracy, however he does attribute the decline partly to casual racial quotas.
Main League Baseball now has quite a lot of initiatives to make the game extra accessible to Black athletes: youth academies, inner-city applications, showcases for gamers from traditionally Black schools. The league has seen some optimistic returns; 9 of the primary 21 picks within the 2024 MLB draft had been Black, and the general proportion of Black Individuals within the majors has elevated barely prior to now two years. An MLB spokesperson advised me that almost a 3rd of the 64 Black gamers on Opening Day rosters in 2026 emerged from the league’s growth pipeline.
Jesse Cole and Bob Kendrick are, of their manner, contributing to the mission to revive Black baseball. However the issue with bringing again the Clowns is identical drawback the crew posed in its heyday. For so long as the Negro Leagues existed, Black ballplayers and their champions had been battling for recognition and respect. What they had been combating towards was the concept that their model of the sport was nothing however a clown present.
It began with The Pittsburgh Courier’s Wendell Smith, a forceful advocate for integration within the Nineteen Forties, who believed that the Ethiopian Clowns risked discrediting the whole Negro Leagues. It continued with Piper Davis, who mentored Willie Mays as a participant and supervisor for the Birmingham Black Barons. “For those who had been Black, you was a clown. As a result of within the films, the one time you noticed a Black man, he was a comic or a butler,” Davis as soon as stated, reflecting on life and baseball underneath Jim Crow. “However didn’t no one clown in our league however the Indianapolis Clowns. We performed baseball.”
Historians of Black baseball have lengthy struggled with how you can inform the story of the Clowns. Larry Lester, one of many co-founders of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, advised me he noticed the previous Clowns play as a toddler within the Nineteen Sixties. “The skits had been hilarious,” he stated. “However as a child, I didn’t understand the damaging stereotypes that had been being portrayed.” Now, when he recounts the historical past of the Negro Leagues, he focuses on the best Black baseball groups ever assembled, such because the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords.
One other of the museum’s co-founders, Phil Dixon, advised me that he deliberately omitted King Tut and Spec Bebop from his acclaimed photographic historical past of the Negro Leagues: They weren’t the picture of Black baseball that he needed to painting.
Lester and Dixon have, by way of their analysis and advocacy, helped get Black baseball legends enshrined in Cooperstown and have their statistics acknowledged within the sport’s official document books. However regardless of their finest efforts, the Clowns nonetheless play an outsize position in public reminiscence.
Kendrick, who presides over the Negro Leagues museum at present, advised me that he doesn’t wish to conceal the uglier components of the Clowns’ historical past. On the museum, a show that includes the Clowns notes that they “strengthened frequent black stereotypes and had been frowned upon by league administration and the black press.” Under the signal: a photograph of King Tut in a billowing clown go well with.
How do you append that type of caveat to the present that the brand new Clowns are placing on? I needed to ask Jesse Cole this and different questions. However the Banana Ball PR crew, which made the Clowns’ gamers out there to me in Memphis, stopped replying to my inquiries and by no means granted my requests to talk with Cole. Meyer, the present coordinator, additionally didn’t reply after initially promising to share his five-page memo on what separates the modern-day Clowns from the minstrelsy of their ancestors.
In our dialog, Meyer had emphasised that the bigger story he desires to inform concerning the Clowns is one in every of triumph and unity—how a gaggle of Negro Leagues gamers overcame adversity on the way in which to success. “That is all about us coming collectively, and it doesn’t matter who you’re, doesn’t matter what you seem like; you might be a part of this crew,” he stated. The uplifting narrative he was laying out didn’t a lot resemble the scholarship of Lester and Dixon, to say nothing of Reginald Howard’s jeremiad.
“Sure, race is part of it,” Meyer stated. “However how will we make the story concerning the particular person gamers and who the Negro Leagues and the unique Indianapolis Clowns really had been?” He added, “I believe that that story is so, a lot greater than the story of segregation.”
Who had been the unique Indianapolis Clowns? A few of them had been historical past makers, like Hank Aaron and Toni Stone. Others, like King Tut and Spec Bebop, had been entertainers. However most had been simply atypical baseball gamers, males like Howard.
In Memphis, Howard was launched on the sphere as a person who’d suited up for the Clowns “as they barnstormed throughout the nation, bringing pleasure and world-class baseball to followers of all backgrounds.” However that wasn’t the baseball life he’d really lived. In his day, the late ’50s, the Clowns didn’t usually draw huge crowds, they usually weren’t taking part in at a world-class stage. “I want to say that I performed in the identical league as Larry Doby and Jackie Robinson, but it surely wasn’t,” he advised me. “The caliber of ball was not the identical.”
Howard stated it’s all the time bothered him that a lot storytelling about Black baseball is “rhetoric and lies.” Given the relative dearth of details about the sport’s preintegration stars, the historical past of the Negro Leagues has lengthy been filled with tall tales—Josh Gibson hitting a house run so prodigious that the ball didn’t come down till the subsequent day. Within the midst of all this mythology, Howard believes, telling a real story is usually a radical act.
Once I requested Howard to explain himself as a participant, he stated that he was solely “truthful,” with fast ft, fast arms, and a great thoughts, but in addition a weak arm and warning-track energy. I couldn’t assist however consider Kobe Robinson and Nick Wilson, gifted younger gamers who didn’t fairly have what it takes to make all of it the way in which to the majors. Now they’ve the possibility to maintain taking part in the sport they love.
Whether or not the brand new Indianapolis Clowns reach bringing Black followers and athletes again to baseball might come down extra to gamers like Robinson and Wilson than to Bob Kendrick and Jesse Cole. In Memphis, I watched the Clowns signal autographs for a predominantly white crowd. I additionally noticed Wilson lean down to talk with a gaggle of Black youngsters, giving them time and a spotlight and a unique picture of what a baseball participant might seem like. He was getting them whereas they’re younger.
This text seems within the June 2026 print version with the headline “The Clown Present.” If you purchase a ebook utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
