On this week’s episode, we take a very fun and surprising look at the world of Banana Ball, the enormously popular traveling league of dancing, singing, thirst-trapping baseball players who have become a bigger draw than many Major League teams. (Think of Banana Ball as the Harlem Globetrotters, except for baseball and also optimized for TikTok.)
And this season, the Banana Ball has added a new team to its universe: the Indianapolis Clowns, who were resurrected as a nod to the circus-act 1930s Negro League team of the same name. The Indianapolis Clowns, in fact, are the spiritual ancestors of the Savannah Bananas – the founding team of the Banana Ball.Those old Clowns did stunts and tricks and played some good baseball at times, too. But that’s not all: reporter Josh Levin swung by the pod to talk about his reporting on the Clowns' tricky, icky history, and he told me that a lot of Black folks really didn’t rock with them in the 1930s and 1940s because they felt their antics kept Black baseball and Black players from being taken seriously.
As Josh wrote for the Atlantic, some of the only existing footage of the original Clowns from back in the day showed one of their players, a first baseman, “dropping to his knees as if to pray for a base hit and getting awakened from a fainting spell by a smelly foot.” Sometimes the Clowns literally took the field in white clown makeup. And when you consider that their contemporaries were teams like the Zulu Cannibal Giants (!) who took to the field in bare feet (!!), grass skirts (!!!), and “tribal” war face paint (!!!!), you kinda understand why people felt some type of way about the Clowns’ on-field hijinks.
At a recent Clowns game, Josh met Reginal Howard, a former second baseman for the original Indianapolis Clowns who is now in his 90s. The new Clowns’ resurrection comes at a moment where African American participation in baseball and Black viewership of the MLB are at or near historic lows – it’s awkward to think that at the same time Major League Baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day to commemorate the day he broke the sport’s color barrier in 1947, the number of Black players in the majors today is almost as low as it was in the decade after his debut. And Reginald thinks there is a conspiracy to keep Black players out of the sport.
He also told Josh about how wary he is of the (understandable) mythologizing of the Negro League players – that the retelling of their exploits to make sure they weren’t forgotten has led to tall tales and embellishment of their physical prowess and skill and personalities. But Reginald said to Josh that the Negro Leagues were full of all kinds of players and people — some incredible, some not remarkable at all — and that is worth remembering, too. It’s a detail that stuck with me, a reminder to be cognizant of how often really well-meaning attempts to counter historical racism swing back the other way and lead us to a very different kind of dehumanization than we usually talk about, the kind which ennobles folks while stripping them of texture and dimension.
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Why is it that so many women of color are really into astrology? Parker — a witchy, astrology girlie herself — is trying to answer that very question on this weekend’s episode. And bonus: since the Code Switch podcast is turning 10 (!!) this month, so we’re getting our chart read! You can hear that episode first thing tomorrow morning wherever you get your podcasts.
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Speaking of Code Switch's 10th birthday, help us celebrate by telling us about episodes you loved, hated, want us to update, or ones you'd wish we would make. Send us a voice memo (or a regular ol' email) to codeswitch@npr.org. We might just use what you share in a future episode!
Written by Gene Demby and editedby Dalia Mortada
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