What Is Banana Ball?

America’s Pastime Gets a Fast-Paced Facelift

By Jordan Staggs | Photography courtesy of the Savannah Bananas

“I was a huge Red Sox fan as a kid and played baseball with my dad,” says Scituate, Massachusetts, native Jesse Cole, echoing the memories of countless American children. But Cole’s love of the game runs deeper than that of a casual fan. It’s fitting that he’s in the stands at Fenway Park in Boston as he recounts his history as a baseball fan and player—it’s the stadium he dreamed of one day playing in as a pro. “My dad owned South Shore Baseball Club, and I played from when I was five years old. I had a dream of getting drafted by the majors and pitching here at Fenway Park. I loved the game, but I didn’t get the opportunity to play professionally after I tore my shoulder. That setback got me into working behind the scenes in baseball, but then I realized, as a fan, there were opportunities to change the game and make it better. That’s what we’re doing today.”

When he dreamed of making baseball better and more enjoyable for fans, though, Cole likely never imagined he would be doing it while standing in Fenway dressed in a bright yellow tuxedo and bowler hat. Yet that’s how the founder of Banana Ball made around 37,000 fans’ day when the Savannah Bananas faced off against their archrivals, the Party Animals, at the famed Red Sox stadium on June 8. The Bananas, the Party Animals, and the latest team to join the Banana Ball exhibition league, the Firefighters, might not be facing off against MLB teams (usually), but they are selling out every game, going viral online, and changing the way many fans view America’s pastime.

Cole graduated from Wofford College in South Carolina, where he played baseball and developed his own major in leadership. “I wanted to learn about leadership in business, leadership in government, and leadership in baseball and coaching,” he says. “That’s how I’ve gone through my life—with baseball as a guide. And then I started doing my own thing, which led me to start Banana Ball and create the Savannah Bananas.”

Coming up with an entirely new, faster-paced, more entertainment-driven way to play baseball didn’t happen overnight. The Savannah Bananas began as a traditional Coastal Plain League collegiate amateur team in 2015 and remained in the league until 2022, winning three championships.

But something else also happened along the way—Banana Ball was born. The Savannah Bananas began playing exhibition games, with their on- and off-field antics including trick plays, dance numbers, and crowd participation. But even with the between-plays entertainment, many fans would leave the stadium early, just as he noticed they would at almost any college, minor league, or major league game. Cole’s desire to keep fans in their seats until the end of each game led him to think about how he would most like to experience baseball from their perspective.

“I started putting myself in the fans’ shoes,” he says. “I read every book on Walt Disney, P.T. Barnum, and more, and started learning about the greatest companies that cared about customer experience and fans. I realized that even with our games creating so much entertainment, from dancing players to breakdancing coaches, fans were still leaving games early. After watching them leave games at nine o’clock, nine-thirty, I said, ‘Well, there’s a problem with the game. We’ve got to make the game faster and more exciting.’ So that’s when I started writing down, ‘What are the most boring parts of a baseball game, and how do you make it fun?’”

Some examples of those “boring parts” for Cole included mound visits, stepping out, bunting, and walks. He started thinking about ways to eliminate those from the game, changing the rules for his Banana Ball concept to make it the exact opposite in some regards, and adding a two-hour limit to regulation play to help the game move faster and keep fans engaged.

“That’s what we started creating in 2018,” he recalls. “We started testing. How you take a thing from nothing to reality is a series of experimentation—tons of experiments. So, we tested the idea in front of zero fans at Lander University in 2018, and then we tested it in 2020 during COVID with a few fans. We tested again in 2021 on a one-city ‘world tour’—we’re constantly testing the game and seeing how it can improve. Each day, we see more of these games, and we find ways to make them better. It’s a series of ‘plussing’ the experience, a concept we also learned from Walt Disney.”

Of course, changing the rules of baseball was a risky move, even for exhibition games that had no bearing on the actual league standings. “You’re always going to get criticized when you do something different,” Cole admits. “I think, as Jeff Bezos said, you need to be willing to be misunderstood. We were criticized by baseball traditionalists saying, ‘You can’t change the game; this is a great game!’ And it is, but we’re not trying to be the same traditional baseball game. We’re trying to make it more about entertainment. The biggest criticism was about fundamentally changing the rules of the game. Going to a two-hour time limit and letting fans catch foul balls for outs is crazy, but what we learned from our fans is that’s what they want—and that’s what we’re always going to try to do.”

After seeing more and more fans pack the stadium and start following the team’s social media accounts, the Savannah Bananas split from the Coastal Plain League in 2022 to make Banana Ball a full-time gig. But who are the players, and how do their desired skills differ from a top college or pro league recruit?

“We are certainly looking for a different type of candidate and performer to play with us in Banana Ball,” Cole explains. “We aren’t looking for the best baseball players in the world—we’re looking for the greatest Banana Ball players in the world. A great Banana Ball player is someone who is unbelievable at entertainment, unbelievable at being fans-first, engaging with fans, and also has an unbelievable amount of Banana Ball talent. That means they can do backflip catches and trick plays, they know how to celebrate when they score, they can do bat flips, and as a pitcher, they’re quick-pitching and can do things people have never seen before on a baseball field. That’s what we are looking for in Banana Ball.”

The Savannah Bananas have been likened to the Harlem Globetrotters and lauded as “the greatest show in baseball.” Its players have become internet celebrities thanks to the league’s dedicated social media team recording and sharing their walkouts, dance breaks, celebrations, greatest catches, fan interactions, and just plain ridiculous shenanigans during and outside of games. The Bananas’ TikTok account has over 8.6 million followers and counting, with its videos regularly racking up millions of views.

The hype is real off the web, too. Savannah Bananas tickets have a waitlist of over two million people. Yes—two million. The Bananas recorded over half a million fans at their Banana Ball World Tour in 2023, which included eighty-seven games in thirty-three cities across the United States.

Even the league’s founder admits the crowd response is bananas! “I don’t think I ever dreamed of creating something like this,” Cole says. “I just dreamed of having fun and creating something I would love that hopefully a lot of fans would love.”

Some initial pushback to the experimental team making its home in Savannah, Georgia, was not unwarranted, Cole admits. “At first—and I don’t blame them—when we came to Savannah, there was a lot of skepticism about who this new team was, especially when we named it the Bananas. People were like, ‘This is an embarrassment to our city. Why are they naming the team something silly?’ But then they started to experience the game, and boy, the community really embraced us and supported us. I’ve heard from a lot of people that they’re proud to have us, and that means a lot. My wife, Emily, and I, with our entire team, have put so much into that community. We’ve had hundreds of games and invested so much. To have the community we started in, our home, stand behind us means more than I think people even realize.”

Citing some of his greatest inspirations and leadership idols as Walt Disney and P.T. Barnum, Cole says, “They’ve inspired me with vision, promoting, and putting on a great show and experience. One of my favorite quotes from P.T. Barnum is, ‘The noblest art is that of making others happy.’ He was obsessed with bringing together people that many would say were misfits. What we always try to do with the Bananas is bring people together.” He continues, “What’s truly special is we get to interact with our fans before and after the game. To know people are coming from all over the country, calling this a bucket-list trip—people are hugging us, getting emotional about how much this means for their family, and saying it was a core memory—that means more than anything. It’s truly special, and now seeing my family and all our kids being able to experience it is bringing together two worlds.”

Growing the league and learning how to do so responsibly are always on Cole’s mind, he says. In addition to its world tour season games, Banana Ball is hosting its first-ever Bananaland at Sea cruise from Miami to the Bahamas from October 14–18, 2024. The league’s community outreach also expanded recently to include a nonprofit organization, Bananas Foster, which brings families together through Banana Ball and educates people about the foster care system.

“It’s not easy trying to do more and make sure our staff and everyone is taken care of and treated really well,” Cole says. “That is something that we are unbelievably focused on while we grow this, so learning how to scale in the best way possible for not only the fans but also for our people is something I think about daily.”

As for what’s coming up next, he shares, “Just stay tuned—every week, we’re doing something we’ve never done before!”

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To learn more, visit TheSavannahBananas.com or follow them on Instagram and TikTok @thesavbananas, @officialbananaball, and @yellowtuxjesse to see what the hype is about. The best way to get tickets, Cole says, is to join the league’s K Club (the K is for potassium, found in bananas) interest list for a chance to join and be added to the lottery for 2025 and beyond.