Jesse Cole’s return to Spartanburg began in a way reminiscent of many mornings he spent as a student-athlete at Wofford: He took a jog through campus, then stepped on Russell C. King Field. It’s the field where Cole ’06 created some of the best moments in his baseball career and the field where his pitching days ended with a shoulder injury.
Recalling that pivotal moment ahead of a Banana Ball game on Thursday at Fifth Third Park, Cole could only smile.
“That injury was the end of my pitching dream, but to be back here today, this is the start of a much bigger dream,” he says, adorned in a yellow tuxedo that has become synonymous with him and his reimagined brand of baseball.
Cole is the owner of six teams in the Banana Ball Championship League including the Savannah Bananas, a team he converted from a summer wooden-bat college team with low attendance into an experimental baseball team that has rewritten the rules of the game. In Banana Ball, trick plays are the norm, dance routines are commonplace, foul balls can be caught by fans for outs and there isn’t a minute that goes by without action.
What debuted before a crowd of 1,000 people has grown into a phenomenon that has expanded to six teams and will draw more than 3 million fans to ballparks and stadiums this year. With a capacity of about 5,000 people, Fifth Third Park is one of the smallest venues to host a Banana Ball game this year, but it’s one Cole was itching to put on the calendar.
“I’ve always had an eye on Spartanburg because of the experiences, the memories and the moments I’ve had here,” Cole says. “With the new park and the idea of the Indianapolis Clowns and their historical relevance here, to bring them here was something I decided we were going to do.”
Storytelling is one of Cole’s favorite parts of his job. In Spartanburg, he got to share the story of the Clowns, who faced the Texas Tailgaters in Thursday’s game. The Clowns’ history goes back a century to the historic Negro Leagues; they were one of the earliest “barnstorming” teams.
“They were the first team to treat the game for what it is: It’s supposed to be fun,” Cole says. “You can do trick plays. You can do things that people haven’t seen before on a baseball field.”
Cole also told the story of Bill Heward, who threw his first pitch as an Indianapolis Clown in 1971 at Duncan Park in Spartanburg. Fifty-five years later, he returned to pitch for the Clowns on Thursday and retired the only batter he faced on one pitch.
Curiosity has inspired Cole to create moments like these. What began as a history lesson at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in 2022 turned into the question, “How can I revive the Clowns franchise?” As a Wofford student, curiosity also led Cole to his humanities major in a different direction.
“What I heard about humanities is, ‘Oh, few people do that major.’ Well, why? What does it mean to be a humanities major?” Cole says. “I started reading every book about P.T. Barnum, Walt Disney, Saturday Night Live, Cirque du Soleil, WWE … you name it. I started learning everything I could about putting on a show and entertaining people. I got that spark while I was at Wofford.”
Cole is now hosting consistently sold-out shows, and he credits Kerry Ferguson, adjunct professor of theatre, with helping him learn how to do so. With Ferguson, Cole wrote, designed and acted in an original children’s theatre play his senior year at Wofford called “Go to Bed, Amelia Red,” in which he spent much of the runtime on stage as a blue dog named Rover Red or as Sir Wonderfulot, a muscular knight.
“The encouragement I got from her was amazing. I was a 225-pound baseball player learning how to put on a show. We used to work on the lines while playing catch,” Cole says. “I think that inspired me more than I even realize, because I learned how to bring joy and create something that never existed.”
During the Banana Ball performance that Cole led Friday night at Fifth Third Park, a Wofford jersey peeked out from beneath his trademark yellow jacket, a reminder of the foundational years that set him on a path toward a one-of-a-kind career.
“I’m so grateful for all that happened here, because I’m not sure this would have existed if I wasn’t at Wofford, if I wasn’t doing children’s theatre and if my baseball career hadn’t ended,” he says.