BANANA BALL IS MONSTROUS FUN — A PLAYER ON STILTS? — AND SELLS OUT STADIUMS
Major League Baseball might go away after 2026 — and maybe no one will care with the rousing success of the Savannah Bananas, with all their frills, a hotter ticket than the Dodgers-Yankees series
The stadium is dark. Every seat is occupied. Late in the game, squealing guitars from an old Coldplay tune produce a sing-songy chant against the stars, making us forget the baseball notables who normally preside here. Isn’t this Fenway Park? Isn’t this Citizens Bank Park? Isn’t this Yankee Stadium? Shouldn’t we be flabbergasted that the Savannah Bananas sell out buildings when major-league teams generally do not?
“It was all yellow,” the people sang.
Because the Bananas wear yellow.
In truth, there is no reason to be shocked, America. They are barnstorming honeybees — loving life, doing backflips, thrusting hips and using a batter/pitcher on stilts at 10 feet, nine inches — in a hoot-and-holler imitation of a plagued sport that ranks below the NFL, the NBA and college football in all-metrics consumability. The Bananas do not describe themselves as gay, though the LGBTQ+ community loves them and might think otherwise when opponents throw shirtless Rihanna parties. They are the Harlem Globetrotters at the quarter pole of the 21st century, with a stuntman-and-dance rage, led by an owner, Jesse Cole, who wears a yellow tuxedo and top hat. To create the Bananas, he sold his house, emptied his savings account and slept in an air bed inside a dump.
“You’ve got to get through the messy to get to the great,” Cole said.
Are they great? They might have to be if Major League Baseball locks out players — and cancels all or part of the 2027 season — after the collective bargaining agreement expires on Dec. 1 of next year. Games aren’t allowed to last more than two hours. If a batter is walked, he might reach third base because seven fielders must touch the ball first. Anyone who bunts is ejected. A shortstop might stand under a pop-up and suddenly pushes the ball to the third baseman, who catches it and is checked by a heart doctor. A fan who catches a fly records an out. Players wear kilts.
This is playful burlesque, Banana Ball across the land. In southern California, anyone who wanted two tickets for a Dodgers-Yankees game — the lowest-priced — paid $343.44 to see Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. On the same May weekend, anyone who wanted the Bananas at Angel Stadium paid $419.04 for two seats. In Philadelphia, prices are as high as $867. In Houston, famous names showed up — Roger Clemens, Roy Oswalt — and pitched for the yellow team. The Bananas drew 81,000 fans at Clemson and will continue to jam major parks in Baltimore, Denver, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Seattle, Chicago and the Bronx — where third parties are selling tickets at higher prices than the Yankees. Settle back and watch baseball that evidently is more appealing than real baseball.
“How do we make someone feel something?” Cole said. “Nonstop. We want to give people energy, delivering it every second, from the moment we open the gates at two o’clock until the last fan leaves at 11.”
Oddly, the Bananas have detractors. Why? “Anybody that criticizes this, we’re not for them,” Cole told the Los Angeles Times. “There’s tradition in baseball, perfect. They’ve got Major League Baseball. For people that want to come out and have fun, not take themselves too seriously and see something they've never seen before — and hopefully see the greatest show in sports — we’ve built something for you.”
Football is for diehards and gamblers. Baseball is reduced to the Athletics and Rays playing in minor-league stadiums while the Bananas have all-day tailgates. “I know all of us have dreamed about playing in sold-out stadiums, and it's just incredible, said Reese Alexiades, who never dreamed of these scenes. Next year, six teams will engage in a full-blown Banana Ball schedule. “A 60-game season, with new marquee events, that will determine standings and playoff implications culminating in one league champion,” Cole said. The Bananas do not win every game. But they won the World Tour last season and surely will be in this year’s championship game at Grayson Stadium.
That would be in Savannah, a cool town with a wild ride. This past Saturday night, ESPN televised the Bananas live in Boston and posted game video on its website. They are being treated like a real story, which should bother MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, who already has been rejected by the network and hopes renewed talks won’t lead to a permanent banishment. Why would ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro, a baseball fan with a new direct-to-consumer service this fall, want to deep-dive with a sport that might not have much of a future?
Manfred wants players to question their union. “There seems to be kind of a mismatch between what we see at the union leadership level and what the players are thinking,” he said in Atlanta. “The strategy is to get directly to the players. I don’t think leadership of this union is anxious to lead the way to change. So we need to energize the workforce in order to get them familiar with or supportive of the idea that maybe change in the system could be good for everybody.”
Of course, union leader Tony Clark fired back at the commissioner. “A sales pitch … full of misleading or downright false statements,” he told The Athletic. “MLB should be focused on further promoting our sport. Instead, their stated plan is once again to try to divide players from each other and their union in service of a system that would add to the owners’ profits and franchise values, while prohibiting clubs from fully competing to put the best product on the field for fans and limiting player compensation, guarantees and flexibility.”
Nobody on this planet wants to see the owners and players fight … again, to the point of spoiling the game once and for all. This should explain the purpose of the Savannah Bananas. MLB scowls and chases us away. Why run when we have Dakota Albritton, explaining the phone call that asked him to stand on stilts?
“I was pushing a wheelbarrow full of concrete and my phone went off,” he said. “It was my mama.”
Mama never knew he’d be bigger than Ohtani.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.