Correlle Prime and the Indianapolis Clowns Balance Banana Ball Fun With Negro Leagues History
- Correlle Prime, the Indianapolis Clowns’ first baseman, says reviving a Negro Leagues name means carrying real history onto the field every night, not just running through a dance routine.
- Owner Jesse Cole says the original Clowns “changed the game” by putting entertainment at the center of baseball decades before Banana Ball existed.
- Historians and reporters who cover the team say fans need the full story behind the name, not just the highlight clips, to understand what it stands for.
A Name Borrowed From Baseball’s Hardest Era
Correlle Prime plays first base for the Indianapolis Clowns, one of two expansion teams the Banana Ball Championship League added for 2026. He is also a Black player whose family comes from the South, which puts him in the middle of a conversation the team cannot avoid: what does it mean to put the Clowns name back on a jersey in 2026?
“There is a sentimental aspect to this franchise and what we’re bringing to light,” Prime said. “And it is uncomfortable for a lot of people, Black people, white people, there’s a lot of uncomfortable conversations that people don’t particularly want to have. A lot of these problems exist in different ways today. So we just want to spread joy and bring people together.”
The original Indianapolis Clowns trace back to the Miami Giants of the 1930s, a barnstorming club built on comedy first and baseball second. The team rebranded twice, moved north, joined the Negro Leagues as the Cincinnati Clowns, and settled in Indianapolis by the mid-1940s, where it played into the late 1980s. Hank Aaron signed his first professional contract with the Clowns. Satchel Paige pitched for them. Toni Stone became the first woman to play professional baseball in a men’s league wearing a Clowns uniform.
Why Jesse Cole Built a Team Around Them
Banana Ball founder Jesse Cole has pointed to the original Clowns as a direct influence on everything he built with the Savannah Bananas. “They changed the game,” Cole said. “They made baseball about more than who wins and loses. They made it about the entertainment, the fun, the jokes, the pranks. When I heard the story about the Indianapolis Clowns at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, I was so inspired.”
Cole partnered with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum to bring the name back for the 2026 season. Museum president Bob Kendrick called the revival a chance to entertain fans and teach them “the rich history of the Negro Leagues while paying homage to the team that helped influence Banana Ball.” Errick Fox, who joined the Bananas coaching staff in 2018, runs the team day to day. Ryan Howard, the 2006 National League MVP and a 2008 World Series champion with the Phillies, joined as Primetime coach, a title reserved for the Clowns’ biggest games. “Banana Ball is all about energy, entertainment, flipping the script,” Howard said, “and you know what? That’s exactly what the Negro Leagues brought to the game from day one.”
Not Everyone Sees a Clean Tribute
The original Clowns drew criticism in their own time, and some of that history complicates how the revival lands today. Leslie Etienne, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Indiana University Indianapolis, said the comedy the team was known for came from players who took real risks barnstorming through the segregated South. “These are places where people are being lynched, right,” Etienne said. “There’s just a lot you have to unpack. What was that community like in that area? What was the reason why you went there? Who were you going there to entertain?”
Indianapolis Recorder sports reporter Noral Parham said the original team faced pushback from inside the Black community too, including the Black press, who worried the Clowns’ comedy undercut the seriousness of the Civil Rights era. Parham pushes back on that read of history now. “It wasn’t a minstrel show, it was a master class,” Parham said. “I think that’s the big part of it. They were damn serious, so I don’t want the next generation to forget that.” He worries the new fan base built around TikTok clips will skip the deeper story entirely. “It’s almost like when a really good movie is remade. Now we know that there’s going to be a whole generation of new viewers, new fans, in this case. They don’t know the history, they haven’t seen the original. You can’t fault them for it, but I think we might have to put that on the businesses, the brands and the stakeholders.”
What the Team Says It Owes the Original Players
Milton Thompson, a sports attorney in Indianapolis and Indianapolis Indians board member, met Hank Aaron before he died and talked with him about his brief stretch with the Clowns in 1952. Thompson said Aaron valued the chance the team gave him to play in front of crowds, but also felt the newer generations of players did not grasp what came before them. “Hank was like, these guys don’t even, they don’t know what we went through,” Thompson said, recalling Aaron’s comparison to Muhammad Ali returning home from the Olympics unable to eat in a restaurant in his own hometown.
Prime said the current Clowns have spent time with players from the original era, listening to their stories directly rather than relying only on archives, and the team plays a video featuring the original players before every home game. Whether that is enough to satisfy critics like Etienne and Parham remains an open question. What is not in question is that the Clowns enter their first Championship League season carrying a name that means more than any expansion team’s name in recent sports memory, win or lose.
A Debut Built for Two Cities
The Clowns made their on field debut on February 27 against the Party Animals at Dick Howser Stadium in Tallahassee, a road opener that put the new franchise in front of a crowd that had come to see the established teams rather than the newcomers. The bigger homecoming came in May, when the tour brought the Clowns to Victory Field in Indianapolis for two games, the first time in decades the city hosted a team wearing that name. Ryan Howard’s arrival as Primetime coach gave the Indianapolis dates extra pull in the local press, pairing a hometown moment for the franchise with a coach who grew up an hour and a half down the interstate in Cincinnati before starring in Philadelphia.
Reporters covering the Clowns beat, including Parham at the Indianapolis Recorder, have kept returning to the same tension all season: a team built to entertain, wearing a name built on survival. Banana Ball has drawn comparisons to the Harlem Globetrotters from its earliest days, and the Clowns make that comparison explicit by tracing their own lineage to a club historians already described as baseball’s version of the Globetrotters decades before Jesse Cole was born. The difference this time is that the museum charged with preserving that history helped write the new chapter instead of watching it happen from the outside.
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