The Savannah Bananas Bring Back a Negro Leagues Team

Photographs by Kevin Wurm “My dad was a big Lakers fan,” Kobe Shaquille Robinson told me, indulging an admittedly obvious question. Robinson was born in 2001, in the middle of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal’s three-NBA-championship run. But he discovered early on that his name couldn’t help him shoot a basketball. As an athlete, he stood out on the pitcher’s mound. Robinson is 6 foot 2 and lanky; when we met, he was wearing his hair in two-strand twists. We were talking on a Saturday afternoon in Memphis, in a retro-style downtown stadium named after an auto-parts chain. It was, in a way, the perfect venue for a conversation with an up-and-coming ballplayer—a minor-league park with all the trimmings of a major-league one. It was also, objectively speaking, an unusual workplace for a Black athlete in 2026. Back in the mid-1980s, during the prime of Ozzie Smith, Rickey Henderson, Tony Gwynn, and Dwight Gooden, more than 18 percent of Major League Baseball players were Black. Now that figure is just below 7 percent—right around where it was in 1956, less than a decade after Jackie Robinson broke the color line. No single reason explains Black Americans’ diminished footprint in the sport; the high cost of equipment and travel ball, dwindling municipal funding for youth leagues, the rise of the NFL and the NBA, and a parallel surge of Latino talent have all contributed. Despite these factors, Kobe Robinson still dreamed of a life in baseball. “I just felt like the man out there,” he said. “So I stuck with it.” Robinson’s fastball, which earned him the nickname “Hot Sauce,” carried him from a Tennessee community college to the 2021 MLB draft, where he was selected by the San Diego Padres. Injuries, however, stymied his early career: He had issues with his elbow, then his shoulder. In 2024, the Padres released him. The closest he ever got to the big show was A‑ball, three rungs below the majors. At 23, Robinson was out of baseball and, he said, “in a dark space.” He took overnight caregiving shifts at a group home, delivered packages for Amazon, and searched for a way to get back on the field. Last fall, after a year on the sidelines, he found a potential opening: The Savannah Bananas were hiring. Over the past three-plus years, the Bananas have gone from a baseball curiosity to a cultural juggernaut. The team tours the country playing what it calls Banana Ball: a family-friendly, souped-up, TikTok-ready version of the national pastime. Games feature singing and dancing and celebrity cameos, plus backflipping outfielders, stilt-walking batters, and the occasional double to the gap. Last year, according to the organization’s own data, the Bananas and their affiliated teams sold 2.2 million tickets—more than 11 different MLB franchises. The Bananas are frequently compared to the Harlem Globetrotters. But unlike their basketball counterparts, who ritually defeat the rival Washington Generals, the Bananas don’t script the outcomes of their games. They play against—and sometimes lose to—a rotating band of teams with their own personalities and followings. Among their opponents are the denim-clad Texas Tailgaters, the often-shirtless Party Animals, and the Firefighters, who make their entrance in full firefighting uniforms, as if to douse an inferno in right field. Robinson filled out a Prospective Banana Ball Player form and got invited to audition for a roster spot. He knew from a former teammate who played for the Firefighters that this would not be a traditional tryout. “I didn’t want to go dressed as just a baseball player, because that’s not what they look for,” he said. Instead, he went as Frozone, the Incredibles character voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. “It looked kind of goofy,” he said of his blue-and-white bodysuit. “But I said, I don’t care. I’m going out there, and I’m pitching.” In this context, pitching meant doing a synchronized twirl with his infielders, then firing a fastball across home plate. The scouts liked what they saw. A month later, Robinson was drafted by one of two expansion teams making their Banana Ball debut in 2026: the Indianapolis Clowns. Unlike the other teams in the extended Bananas universe, the Clowns are not an original creation. They were a real baseball franchise that competed in the Negro Leagues; in 1952, they signed a teenage prospect named Hank Aaron. Like the Bananas, they were also an entertainment act. The Clowns traveled with acrobats, a “one-man jazz band” called Boogie Woogie Paul, and an actual circus clown. Some of the only existing footage of the original Clowns shows the long-limbed first baseman Reece “Goose” Tatum, who also played for the Globetrotters, dropping to his knees as if to pray for a base hit and getting awakened from a fainting spell by a smelly foot. Jesse Cole, the 42-year-old impresario behind the Bananas, has said that relaunching the Clowns is a way to honor one of Banana Ball’s forebears and preserve the legacy of the Negro Leagues. Robinson was thrilled. The Clowns “paved this way for us,” he told me. “Now we have to bring it back to this day and age and make it even better.” The Clowns also provide an opportunity to increase Black representation in baseball. Robinson, who feared that his career was over, now has another shot. [Read: How the Negro Leagues shaped modern baseball] But the decision to revive the Indianapolis Clowns isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. Although the team’s antics were widely popular, they could also descend into racial caricature. The Clowns rankled both their Negro Leagues peers and Black sportswriters, chief among them Wendell Smith. The influential Pittsburgh Courier columnist called the team a “fourth-rate ‘Uncle Tom’ minstrel show.” He also accused the team’s white owner—who promoted one of his star pitchers as baseball’s version of the shuffling, feebleminded minstrel character Stepin Fetchit—of profiting from “the kind of nonsense which many white people like to believe is typical and characteristic of all Negroes.” The Savannah Bananas have risen to prominence by ostentatiously breaking the rules. Cole, who is white, often talks of his admiration for P. T. Barnum, the brash showman who would do anything to attract an audience. The Bananas’ owner rightly intuited that baseball, the most hidebound of American sports, didn’t know how to market itself to a new, social-media-enabled generation. Cole makes all of his public appearances in a banana-yellow tuxedo and banana-yellow top hat; he has made swaggering nonconformity part of the brand. “If you’re not getting criticized,” he has said, “you’re playing it too safe.” Resurrecting the Clowns definitely isn’t playing it safe. When Bob Kendrick saw Banana Ball for the first time, in 2022, he felt like he was watching something at once new and very familiar. The action on the field was fast-paced and bold, and the fans were rapt. For Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, in Kansas City, Missouri, the scene evoked the audacity of preintegration Black baseball—the daring to build something new in opposition to the mainstream. That May, Kendrick gave Cole and his players a private tour of the museum as part of an ESPN documentary series on the Bananas. Kendrick took the team to the section that featured the Clowns and told Cole that he saw them as an ancestor of the Bananas. “I think that’s when he had the epiphany that someday he would bring back the Indianapolis Clowns,” Kendrick told me. The Clowns’ revival is a business arrangement: The Negro Leagues museum, which owns the Clowns’ intellectual property, received a fee from the Bananas for the rights to use the team’s name and develop a set of new logos. The partnership, Kendrick said, “comes along at a perfect time,” as he’s raising $50 million to build a 35,000-square-foot museum campus in Kansas City. Beyond the cash infusion, the Bananas will bring attention to the Negro Leagues, putting Black baseball history in front of a p…