“My dad was a giant Lakers fan,” Kobe Shaquille Robinson informed 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; after we met, he was carrying his hair in two-strand twists. We have been speaking on a Saturday afternoon in Memphis, in a retro-style downtown stadium named after an auto-parts chain. It was, in a means, the right 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 % of Main League Baseball gamers have been Black. Now that determine is slightly below 7 %—proper round the place it was in 1956, lower than a decade after Jackie Robinson broke the colour line.
No single cause explains Black Individuals’ diminished footprint within the sport; the excessive price 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 acquired 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 area.” He took in a single day caregiving shifts at a gaggle house, delivered packages for Amazon, and looked for a method to get again on the sphere. Final fall, after a yr on the sidelines, he discovered a possible opening: The Savannah Bananas have been hiring.
Over the previous three-plus years, the Bananas have gone from a baseball curiosity to a cultural juggernaut. The workforce 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 characteristic singing and dancing and superstar cameos, plus backflipping outfielders, stilt-walking batters, and the occasional double to the hole. Final yr, based on the group’s personal knowledge, the Bananas and their affiliated groups offered 2.2 million tickets—greater than 11 completely different MLB franchises.
The Bananas are steadily in comparison with the Harlem Globetrotters. However not like their basketball counterparts, who ritually defeat the rival Washington Generals, the Bananas don’t script the outcomes of their video games. They play in opposition to—and generally 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 kind and acquired 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 need 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 seemed sort 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 house plate.
The scouts preferred what they noticed. A month later, Robinson was drafted by certainly one of two growth groups making their Banana Ball debut in 2026: the Indianapolis Clowns.
Not like the opposite groups within the prolonged Bananas universe, the Clowns usually are not an authentic creation. They have 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 have been additionally an leisure act. The Clowns traveled with acrobats, a “one-man jazz band” known as Boogie Woogie Paul, and an precise circus clown. Among 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 wish 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 method to honor certainly one of Banana Ball’s forebears and protect the legacy of the Negro Leagues. Robinson was thrilled. The Clowns “paved this fashion for us,” he informed me. “Now now we have to carry it again to this point in time and make it even higher.” The Clowns additionally present a possibility to extend Black illustration in baseball. Robinson, who feared that his profession was over, now has one other shot.
However the choice to revive the Indianapolis Clowns isn’t as simple as it might appear. Though the workforce’s antics have been extensively standard, they may 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 known as the workforce a “fourth-rate ‘Uncle Tom’ minstrel present.” He additionally accused the workforce’s white proprietor—who promoted certainly one of his star pitchers as baseball’s model of the shuffling, feebleminded minstrel character Stepin Fetchit—of cashing in on “the sort of nonsense which many white folks 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 learn how to 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. “Should you’re not getting criticized,” he has stated, “you’re taking part in it too protected.”
Resurrecting the Clowns undoubtedly isn’t taking part in it protected.
When Bob Kendrick noticed Banana Ball for the primary time, in 2022, he felt like he was watching one thing directly new and really acquainted. The motion on the sphere was fast-paced and daring, and the followers have 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 non-public tour of the museum as a part of an ESPN documentary collection on the Bananas. Kendrick took the workforce to the part that featured the Clowns and informed Cole that he noticed them as an ancestor of the Bananas. “I feel that’s when he had the epiphany that sometime he would carry again the Indianapolis Clowns,” Kendrick informed 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 workforce’s title and develop a set of recent 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 doubtlessly enormous viewers.
In a video saying the Clowns’ return, Kendrick supplied a short lesson on why the workforce 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 girl to get constant taking part in time for knowledgeable baseball membership when she joined the Clowns in 1953. Kendrick defined that the workforce 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 have been the final workforce standing from the Negro Leagues.
Every little thing Kendrick stated within the video is true. However that introduction to the Clowns is incomplete. Their full story is certainly one of ingenuity and endurance, but additionally 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 many years later, a workforce known as the Zulu Cannibal Giants pushed this minstrel custom to a dreadful excessive, taking the sphere in naked ft and grass skirts with “warfare paint” slathered on their our bodies.
The person who created the Cannibal Giants within the Thirties was a former Negro Leagues pitcher. The workforce’s Northeast reserving agent was a New Yorker with a background in vaudeville. His title was Syd Pollock, and he would turn into finest identified for proudly owning one other barnstorming workforce: the Ethiopian Clowns. Pollock’s Clowns wore wigs and pancake make-up and performed below faux-African pseudonyms akin 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 workforce’s most distinguished comic. He would emerge from the dugout wanting like an escaped prisoner, or pantomime capturing craps earlier than dropping his pants. His important collaborator on the Clowns was a dwarf generally known as 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 unimaginable to implement, although, as a result of the Clowns have been so standard—with each white and Black followers—that cash-poor Black-owned golf equipment felt they’d no selection however to e book 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 workforce, which had been nominally primarily based in Miami, rebranded itself, turning into the Cincinnati Clowns earlier than shifting to Indianapolis. They removed the paint, too, although not instantly. At Howard College’s Moorland-Spingarn Analysis Heart, 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 have 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 have 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 workforce 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 workforce’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 need to see,” a triumphant Pollock stated, “and so they’ll come out.”
The increase didn’t final. In his e book Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Wreck of a Black Establishment, the historian Neil Lanctot writes that crowds dwindled the following 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 yr later, all three feminine pioneers have been out of baseball. As an unbiased barnstorming workforce, the Clowns returned to their slapstick roots and performed to smaller audiences. One recreation in 1964—estimated attendance: 400 folks—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 workforce’s roster was totally white.
Slightly 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 process 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 incredible middle fielder.
The previous Pink 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 informed 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 idea and method is a job requirement in Banana Ball. “These guys are baseball gamers,” Errick Fox, the workforce’s head coach, informed me. “You additionally should flip that change and be like, Hey guys, you’re performers.”
Fox grew up in Atlanta within the ’90s, when the Braves’ lineup featured Black superstars akin to Fred McGriff, David Justice, and Deion Sanders. “At the moment, it was thrilling,” he recalled. “All of us sort of gravitated to actually need to be like these guys.” Certainly one of his first duties 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 workforce’s prime recruit. The Clowns’ partnership with the Negro Leagues museum performed a task in his choice 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 who I used to be round,” he stated, “however I undoubtedly wished there to be extra folks to appear to be me.”
A few of Bradley’s new teammates are Banana Ball veterans. Malachi Mitchell informed 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 “numerous racist folks,” he stated, and “the phrases they might use are boastful or he’s doing an excessive amount of.” For the Savannah Bananas, an excessive amount of was the right 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 informed me he generally “felt a bit separated.” When Jesse Cole requested him if he wished to modify to the Clowns, he stated sure instantly. “Now I really feel at house,” he stated.
One other group of Clowns acquired pulled from baseball’s discard pile. When Nick Wilson threw his closing pitch in school, he marked what he thought was the top of his profession by tossing his cleats over a phone wire. Final fall, he was promoting pc tools when he heard a couple of 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 informed me his mom hadn’t been certain about the entire Clowns factor—she nervous that the workforce’s title would possibly put him in a foul mild. 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 have been nonetheless segregated within the metropolis. Now he had the possibility to hold that legacy ahead. “That is historical past,” he informed me. “Why would I not need to be part of a workforce known as the Clowns?”
The workforce 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 workforce’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 Nineteen 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 shortly, you are able to do it slowly, you are able to do it with a spin,” he defined to me.)
Saturday evening’s recreation started with a ceremonial weigh-in. Wilson, the Clowns’ contestant, confronted off in opposition to 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 have been the “house workforce” in Memphis, which meant the Clowns principally acquired subsumed inside their opponent’s hot-pink-and-glistening-pecs aesthetic. “Because the away workforce, we simply don’t have the identical variety of alternatives to share and sort of story-tell,” Joe Meyer informed me.
Meyer is the Clowns’ 24-year-old present coordinator—the person answerable for growing the workforce’s feel and appear. “In my function, I’ll say fairly frankly, I feel in some methods we had anticipated—or critically thought of—an individual of coloration for it, and it’s one thing that’s vital to us, and it’s one thing to speak about,” he stated. However, Meyer, who’s white, has the task, and he feels the importance of what he’s being requested to do: “In the end, 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.”
Daily, Meyer produces and directs the Clowns’ in-game leisure. I first noticed him prowling the sphere with a clipboard, watching over the workforce’s “Hey Ya!” dance routine. That sort of choreographed sequence—what’s identified in Bananaland as an “over-the-top second,” designed to pop dwell within the stadium and in a while social media—tends to be a comparatively small-scale manufacturing. The venture 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 sort 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 workforce, are represented by a coconut carrying sun shades.
The Clowns are extra sophisticated. 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 so much completely different than we predict it did.”
Early on, when Meyer and his colleagues have been kicking round ideas for the workforce, he nervous that they is perhaps veering into whoa territory. He informed me that he wrote up a five-page memo, basically laying out the distinction between a “minstrel present and the model of immediately.” His takeaway: “If we’re tremendous heavy in making these guys appear to be clowns, then we’re actually taking part in into this simply detrimental a part of the historical past.”
The Clowns’ brand, a pair of massive pink footwear, nods to the circus with out approaching the realm of wigs and face paint. Nonetheless, a workforce generally known as 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 evening,” Meyer stated.
In Memphis, the perfect preview of a completely realized Indianapolis Clowns expertise got here throughout pregame introductions. That phase started with some musical theater: a music, “Right here Come the Clowns,” that borrows its tune and pop-history method from Hamilton’s “My Shot.” Written and carried out by the workforce’s hosts, Brandon Bomer and Jarius Jones—each younger Black males—it offers some helpful background for followers who don’t know the workforce’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 incredible middle fielder—whereas Fisher Polydoroff and Mat Wolf threw pitches backwards and forwards between their legs. The workforce 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 shifting in excessive sluggish movement, earlier than rushing up once more. Then the finale: Malachi Mitchell did a backflip, caught an invisible ball at house 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 couple of particular visitor—a determine from the workforce’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 pink C.
Reginald Howard first crossed paths with the Clowns within the late Nineteen Forties, when he labored for the workforce 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 informed 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 youngsters to come back again to baseball? His reply: You’ve acquired to get them whereas they’re younger.
Howard had lately printed a e book about how baseball misplaced Black kids 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 information, 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 following day, Howard handed me a replica of his e book 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 youngsters have been informed—and plenty of got here to imagine—“this malarkey” that they have been higher geared up for sports activities aside from baseball. He additionally watched assets shift towards all-white suburbs whereas they vanished in America’s internal cities. Most 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 Nineteen 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 packages, 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 have been Black, and the general share of Black Individuals within the majors has elevated barely up to now two years. An MLB spokesperson informed 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 means, contributing to the mission to revive Black baseball. However the issue with bringing again the Clowns is identical downside the workforce posed in its heyday. For so long as the Negro Leagues existed, Black ballplayers and their champions have been battling for recognition and respect. What they have been preventing in opposition to was the concept 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. “Should you have 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 below Jim Crow. “However didn’t no person clown in our league however the Indianapolis Clowns. We performed baseball.”
Historians of Black baseball have lengthy struggled with learn how to inform the story of the Clowns. Larry Lester, one of many co-founders of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, informed me he noticed the previous Clowns play as a baby within the Nineteen Sixties. “The skits have been hilarious,” he stated. “However as a child, I didn’t notice the detrimental stereotypes that have 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, informed 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 wished 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 report books. However regardless of their finest efforts, the Clowns nonetheless play an outsize function in public reminiscence.
Kendrick, who presides over the Negro Leagues museum immediately, informed me that he doesn’t need to disguise the uglier parts of the Clowns’ historical past. On the museum, a show that includes the Clowns notes that they “strengthened widespread black stereotypes and have been frowned upon by league administration and the black press.” Beneath the signal: a photograph of King Tut in a billowing clown go well with.
How do you append that sort of caveat to the present that the brand new Clowns are placing on? I wished to ask Jesse Cole this and different questions. However the Banana Ball PR workforce, 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 certainly one of triumph and unity—how a gaggle of Negro Leagues gamers overcame adversity on the best way to success. “That is all about us coming collectively, and it doesn’t matter who you’re, doesn’t matter what you appear to be; you could be a part of this workforce,” 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 truly have been?” He added, “I feel that that story is so, a lot greater than the story of segregation.”
Who have been the unique Indianapolis Clowns? A few of them have been historical past makers, like Hank Aaron and Toni Stone. Others, like King Tut and Spec Bebop, have been entertainers. However most have been simply extraordinary 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 truly lived. In his day, the late ’50s, the Clowns didn’t sometimes draw large crowds, and so they weren’t taking part in at a world-class degree. “I wish to say that I performed in the identical league as Larry Doby and Jackie Robinson, but it surely wasn’t,” he informed 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 following day. Within the midst of all this mythology, Howard believes, telling a real story could be a radical act.
After I requested Howard to explain himself as a participant, he stated that he was solely “truthful,” with fast ft, fast fingers, and an excellent thoughts, but additionally a weak arm and warning-track energy. I couldn’t assist however consider Kobe Robinson and Nick Wilson, proficient younger gamers who didn’t fairly have what it takes to make all of it the best way 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 achieve 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 kids, giving them time and a spotlight and a special picture of what a baseball participant may appear to be. He was getting them whereas they’re younger.
This text seems within the June 2026 print version with the headline “The Clown Present.” Whenever you purchase a e book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
