Jacob Toran
Staff Writer
Baseball is known as America’s favorite pastime. However, many Americans would disagree. With attention spans decreasing every day, and the lengthiness of the game, the sport could use a little more entertainment factor. Enter “Banana Ball.”
Banana Ball is a new type of baseball being played by the Savannah Bananas, a fairly new club out of Georgia that began as a collegiate summer baseball team. This team is not part of the MLB, or any league for that matter; think of them more as an exhibition team, providing a fast-paced, entertaining game for anyone who would like to watch.
Recently, the Bananas have taken the country by storm, selling out every stadium they visit, small and large. To understand why this is happening, we must first understand what Banana Ball actually is.
Jesse Cole, owner of the Savannah Bananas, is the mastermind behind the show. He wanted a baseball game that would hold fans’ attention while entertaining them as well.
“Why don’t we have dancing players, a banana band, a break-dancing coach, a senior citizen dance team, the Banana Nanas,” says Cole. “Think about all the things that are long and slow with baseball and try to make it entertaining.”
Cole decided to combine one of the most popular sports in the United States with his own entertaining twist. He created a show based on the style of some of his favorite entertainers.
“I’ve taken tons of inspiration from Walt Disney and P.T. Barnum, Cirque du Soleil, and ‘Saturday Night Live,’” says Cole. “What the greatest entertainers do is they put themselves in their fans’ shoes.”
Banana Ball’s main focus is on entertaining its fan base. At first glance, when tuning into one of their games, it may look like a regular baseball game. That is, until the players start dancing on the field.
“Whenever we score a run or somebody hits a double or somebody hits a home run, we’re ready to roll those [dances] out,” says Kyle Luigs, a pitcher for the Bananas. “We work very closely with our entertainment team as well as our creative team.”
The hard work that everybody on the team does to both play an actual baseball game and coordinate the dances really pays off.
“Practice-wise, about half our practice looks the same as a normal baseball practice and then the other half is wildly different,” says the head coach of the Bananas, Tyler Gillum. “We got guys on stilts, we are practicing balancing bats, we’re juggling. We have a trampoline that stays on the field. Our guys are always working on acrobatics.”
Entertainment like this has never been seen before in baseball, and because of that and their outreach to social media, the Savannah Bananas have gotten tremendous attention. With their TikTok account racking up millions of views and news stations across the country reporting on them, almost everyone has heard of this team.
“Right now, we have two million people on our waitlist to get tickets, but we only have one million tickets available,” says Gillum.
With reaching more and more people by the minute, the players are excited to make an impact on as many fans as possible.
“My favorite part about [Banana Ball] is that it has an impact on the next generation of baseball players,” says Luigs. “I enjoy continuing to push that boundary of what can you do in front of a live audience that they’ve never seen before and that’s gonna be all the rave they wanna talk about long after the game’s played.”
With the addition of games at six major league ballparks this season, along with a Banana Ball cruise, Bananaland at Sea, in October, and the hopes of eventually taking the game overseas, Cole hopes to continue entertaining fans for years to come.