Savannah Banana Malachi Mitchell (2) flips in the air as the team cheers before the start of a banana ball game against the Kansas City Monarchs at Legends Field in May of 2022 in Kansas City, KS. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
Turkey Mike’s has been the star at San Jose’s 82-year-old ballpark on the corner of East Alma and Senter Road for years.
But for one night this summer, it’ll be all about the Bananas instead of the barbecue.
A batter on stilts – who also plays first base. Back-flipping outfielders. Yellow baseballs. Flaming baseballs … and bats. Twerking umpires. And a 76-year-old relief pitcher who isn’t opposed to chugging a beer in the stands before reaching the mound.
The Savannah Bananas are coming to San Jose. And it happens to be the toughest ticket to score in baseball this summer.
The Bananas have been playing their unique – and wildly entertaining – version of the national pastime for several years, but primarily in the Georgia area. Now, “Banana Ball” is going on the road this summer for 33 games, including six on the West Coast.
Tickets for the July 25 game at San Jose’s Excite Ballpark won’t go on sale until May, but by mid-February, there already were tens of thousands of fans on a waiting list.
“Let me tell you, we are feeling the fact that we are the smallest stadium the Bananas are coming to,” said San Jose Giants general manager Ben Taylor. “The demand for tickets is the demand for a top-five media market in the country, and we only have 3,500 people we can fit here. It’s going to be a crazy, exciting Tuesday night in July.”
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The Bananas were founded on a simple idea: Baseball can be boring.
In 2016, Jesse and Emily Cole purchased a struggling summer collegiate baseball team in Savannah, Georgia, and realized fans weren’t all that interested in the product on the field. So they created a new one.
“We’re not in the baseball business,” Jesse Cole said. “We’re in the entertainment business.”
Gettin' down on the mound
pic.twitter.com/aNKW6Ph8LN
— Savannah Bananas (@TheSavBananas) March 18, 2023
In the process, they’ve created an unexpected empire. The Bananas, a moniker picked by fans in a name-the-team contest, have become a national sensation.
Initially, the hook was in-game entertainment that relied heavily on goofy dance routines by the players and leaned into the absurd. And people loved it. The Bananas have sold out every game since 2016 and have a ticket waitlist of more than 500,000 fans. They have more than 4 million Tik-Tok followers (that’s more than the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers, Cubs and Giants have combined). They have been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and in a five-part ESPN documentary, among other media outlets.
But Cole thinks this summer’s “Banana Ball” tour will change the sports world forever.
“I believe ‘Banana Ball’ is one of the most entertaining and greatest games in the world,” Cole said. ““And I believe there’s the possibility it’ll be the ‘Game of the Future.’”
When the Coles bought the team, franchise survival seemed to be a long shot. They reached out to the Savannah community of about 400,000 people for potential customers and found just one person willing to commit to season tickets.
With little to lose, they got creative. They hired a choreographer who knew nothing about baseball to be the first base coach. They hired a pep band, a “Dad-Bod” cheerleading team called the Man-Nanas and another made up of women in their late 60s called the Banana Nanas. Each game, there was a designated “Banana Baby” who would be picked to wear a banana suit.
On the field, the baseball was traditional. But the players, recruited from colleges around the country to play in the wood-bat Coastal Plain summer league, began to participate in the mid-game dance routines. The unlikely mix was a success. Not only did 4,000-seat Grayson Stadium become the place to be entertained between innings, the Bananas won on the field, capturing league titles in 2016, 2021 and 2022.
A professor at Georgia Southern performed a research study that suggested players’ performances improved while playing for the Bananas largely because they were having more fun.
“Seeing it broken down like this, it was like, this is special… Look, we do play better because of the fun,” Cole said shortly after the study was released. “Anyone who is against all the craziness we have in our ballpark and all the high jinks, well, it actually works.”
With confidence building, the team created a fast-paced entertainment-only spinoff called “Banana Ball” that wouldn’t count in the standings. The first Banana Ball game was played in the summer of 2020 after two years of experimenting.
Banana Ball has nine rules.
- Win an inning, get a point; it’s essentially match play where runs don’t carry over from inning to inning
- Two-hour time limit
- No stepping out of the batter’s box
- No mound visits
- Bunting is not allowed
- There are no walks; if a pitcher throws ball four, the batter can sprint around the bases until every defensive player on the diamond touches the baseball
- Batters can steal first; the ball is always live
- If the game is tied after two hours, it goes to a showdown tiebreaker with a pitcher, catcher and just one fielder on the field to retire the opposing hitter.
- And here’s the rule that ought to keep fans from ever looking at their phones: If a fan catches a foul ball, the batter is out.
‘It’s outrageous,” Cole said.
The Bananas played 30 games of Banana Ball in 2022 and sold out every game, convincing the Coles to fold the collegiate team after the season and turn the franchise’s full-time attention to altering the sports landscape. They hired two teams of players to field the Bananas and their counterpart, the Party Animals. Some of the players were holdovers, but the Bananas found a handful more, thanks to a wacky tryout process in which they cared more about personality than baseball skills.
Their ace, Kyle Luigs, is a former Jacksonville State University pitcher who had a 2.75 ERA for the Bananas in 2021 but now often pitches wearing a cowboy hat and a kilt. Recently, he lit a ball on fire just before throwing a pitch.
They also have Dakota Albritton, who showed up to tryouts on stilts and has become an online sensation.
“All these (minor league) teams have better baseball players than us,” Cole said. “We’re focused on having the greatest players and entertainers coming together. It’s really different.”
Their first manager was Bay Area native Eric Byrnes, the colorful former Oakland A’s outfielder and MLB Network analyst.
One of their first high-profile players was one of the quirkiest players in MLB history: Bill Lee, who was known as “Spaceman” during his 14 seasons in the majors. The 76-year-old lefty pitched relief in Banana Ball last summer, and a video of Lee entering a game from the stands after chugging a fan’s beer went viral. He suffered a cardiac episode while warming up for a game later in the season but was back on the team when the tour kicked off in February.
Other former big leaguers, such as former Giants pitcher Jake Peavy and former A’s outfielder Josh Reddick, have made surprise appearances.
The Cy Young Award Winner, @JakePeavy_22, is back on the mound with his Gold Glove for the Bananas
pic.twitter.com/ZNuQNGCJiB
— Savannah Bananas (@TheSavBananas) March 26, 2023
The Bananas also employ a cast of entertainers and characters that travel with them, prompting some comparisons to a local circus.
“One of my fears is becoming the ‘Harlem Globetrotters of Baseball,’” Cole said. “I have a ton of respect and admiration for the Globetrotters. They changed the game of basketball in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. But for us, I am more interested in being The Grateful Dead, where every single night, they’re doing a completely different set.”
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The San Jose stop will be the smallest venue on the Bananas’ tour, but it’s a win-win stop for both organizations. The Giants had a good working relationship with folks who had worked with the Bananas, and it was too exciting an opportunity to pass up.
“I think they’re a fascinating entertainment option,” said Taylor, the Giants’ GM. “They’ve found a way to manipulate the game of baseball to make it incredibly entertaining for the non-baseball fan while maintaining basic parameters of a baseball game. … To see it up close and personal from an operational standpoint will be fascinating.
“I think everybody on staff is going to be learning from the Bananas the night they’re here, including me.”
The big question: What can minor league baseball operators learn from the Savannah Bananas?
“The biggest draw of the Bananas is the fan engagement with the players,” Taylor said. “One of the things that makes the Bananas go is you have players on the field who are dancing, doing tricks. So that aspect of it is not something that’s ever going to come to minor league baseball, because we’re developing professionals who are trying to make it to the big leagues.
“But are there going to be aspects of things they do between innings that we can figure out how to delve into? I don’t doubt it.”
The Giants already employ in-game entertainment options, including the highly-popular “Beer Batter” that cuts the cost of adult beverages at the concession stand in half for 15 minutes, if a designated opposing hitter strikes out, a promotion even the San Jose players enjoy.
Dan Runsler, a former San Jose Giants pitcher and the team’s current pitching coach, “told us, ‘hey, I got shelled once, but I struck out the beer batter twice, so I went home laughing and happy that night,'” said Giants’ vice president of marketing Matt Alongi.
The idea is the same: Engage the fans. Get them invested. Get them involved.
The Bananas are making history too. The National Baseball Hall of Fame requested a baseball from the Banana’s first game of this year’s tour.
“We did ask for the first yellow ball used in a Banana Ball game as we look to document the rise of the Savannah Bananas as a phenomenon in baseball and their unique approach to the game,” said Jon Shestakofsky, the VP of communications and education at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Don’t be surprised if you see the Bananas soon at big league parks, too. Cole said he is already fielding calls from MLB teams who want to host Banana Ball in their stadiums.
“I mean, MLB will never change,” he said. “They’ll always have the greatest baseball players in the world. I believe that. But Banana Ball is a game that can be something truly special for a younger generation.”
And the young at heart.
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Find out more at https://thesavannahbananas.com.
Originally published at Jason Mastrodonato