The Game Making Baseball Fans Go Bananas

0:09It was a Friday night in Baltimore. Shockingly temperate. It was the perfect night for a ballgame. Last weekend, my colleague Jason Gay caught a game at Camden Yards. That's the home of Baltimore's major league baseball team, the Orioles. The place was completely packed. It felt more like a party than any baseball game I'd ever been to. And it really delivered on what the phenomenon has been. The phenomenon Jason was there to see wasn't the Orioles. it wasn't even really baseball. Jason was there for Banana Ball. Banana Ball, taking America's favorite pastime to new and often ridiculous heights.

0:50The wildest thing in sports today. It's part baseball, part big top, and nonstop fun. And just for the uninitiated, what is Banana Ball? Could you describe it? Banana Ball is a fast-paced, circus-like, short attention span attack on your senses. It is really all about entertainment maximization at all times. And it is an answer to anybody's lament that baseball has become bored. Banana Ball is a lot like baseball. There are pitchers and batters, infielders and outfielders. But the players do more than just play ball. They wear crazy costumes. They cartwheel and dance and perform all kinds of tricks.

1:39D.R. Meadows barehanded backflip. Unbelievable.

1:46In other words, they put on a show. Except it isn't a show. It's a real competition, just with a little more panache. And fans are eating it up. They are selling out Major League Baseball stadiums across the country. They drew 81 ,000 people to a college football stadium. You know, it's kind of hard to argue that the audience is there and wants to see it. And you can't help but say, what is going on here?

2:22Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, August 8th.

2:36Coming up on the show, is Banana Ball reinventing America's pastime?

2:58This is Banana Ball! Jason went to the Banana Ball game last weekend with his wife and kid in tow. They were there to see the Savannah Bananas, the original team of the Banana Ball League. This will come as a surprise to you, but they very much look like bananas. The banana yellow is the signature color of banana baseball, banana ball. Yeah, move over Sabrina Carpenter in butter yellow. It's banana yellow over here. Oh, it's all about banana yellow and it's impossible to miss. And I think that that was clearly the idea, is that that is not a color that you wear out if you're trying to hide. The Bananas were duking it out with a rival team, the Firefighters.

3:44Typical nemesis, the foil for the Savannah Bananas, who are the marquee team, is another collection of players called the Firefighters, who, true to their name, dress like firefighters. They have a pretty cool outfit. it. And they have fans of their own and they have jokes of their own and they have a whole style and way that they play. But well before the game even began, the stadium was already packed. I mean, one thing that was stunning to me was that my friends were going to the game at four o 'clock in the afternoon. And I was like, wait a second, the game isn't until seven o 'clock. Why are you going three hours early?

4:19That's what fans do for Banana Ball. The pregame is a key part of the banana ball experience. There are dozens of events that can happen on the field before the game starts. You can boogie with a senior citizen dance team called the Banana Nanas. I'm Nana Karen. I'm the head Banana Nana. You can rally with the cheerleading squad, the Man Nanas. Which is the dad bod cheer squad. There are even baby crawling races.

4:47Baby races. That must be so fun for the fans. Well, that's one of their mantras. You know, that's a banana ball mantra, which is fans first. And look, you know, they didn't invent that. Every business in some ways is trying to, you know, go right at the customer in every way. But they are distinct within the world of professional sports entertainment in the lengths that they will go to. And it all leads up to the actual game. Banana Nation, it is time. first thing you see, and it's a real jolt to your system, is a clock go right up on the scoreboard that says two hours and ticks, ticks, ticks down from that.

5:29On three, we need everyone here to yell start the clock. One, two, three.

5:40Showtime. That game is not going to go one second longer than two hours. And so if you have sat through a three and a half, four hour baseball game in your life, or watch a football game go into double overtime or whatever, you are thrilled to see that. Liam Spence behind 0-1. Once the players take their places, the show really begins. These players are entertainers. You know, many of them are very, very talented prospects and ex-prospects, but they all have a little bit of showbiz in them. He's going to pull off a backflip catch. it'll be a sacrifice fly for lacy i mean i was shocked the first time i saw an outfielder do a flip and then catch a ball now i've never seen that in the major league game probably because the player would be immediately benched by the manager for doing such a thing also might hurt themselves trying to do a backflip i don't know the opportunity for embarrassment is very very high right exactly but they can do it they all have these kinds of gifts and they you know play with the game with a lot of flair, a lot of personality.

6:44Line drive to him, the glove magician turns it into his 147th trick play on the tour. But another thing, and it's important to say, is that it's good baseball. These are good baseball players. These guys can hit, they can catch, they can do all kinds of things. And so that was something that I think jumped out at me too, is that this is actually compelling baseball to watch. It's not like just jokes and sloppy ball. It's really a good game. Ron Franklin puts a charge into this. Deep out to left center. Hot boy Ron to the bullpen. Second home run of the tour for the firefighters. For all the side shows, Banana Ball does still look a lot like traditional baseball, just with tweaks.

7:27There's the two-hour time limit, and there are other ways to move the game along. Main thing is pace, pace, pace. They want this game to move as quickly as possible. So, for example, the batter in the box cannot leave that box. When they get up there with the bat, they are staying in there. The pitcher is rearing back and throwing as quickly as possible. They are accelerating, accelerating, accelerating. Scoring works differently, too. And if a batter hits a foul ball into the stands and a fan catches it, that counts as an actual out in the game. Dustin Baber with a barrel, but foul! Caught by a fan!

8:02And that's your ball game! It didn't happen at the game Jason went to, but when it does, the fans go wild. And you can get all of this, the pregame, the main event, and all the sideshows, for a relatively low price. In Baltimore, Jason says$60 got you the best seat in the house. I mean, that's not dirt cheap, but it is quite a bit cheaper than the average ticket price for a professional sporting event in 2025. It is designed with the idea of getting families in there, getting young people. What has been the response like to this game? Are there regulars now, people who follow these from game to game?

8:41Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you mentioned that because that was something, you know, I thought most people would be like me, just kind of like, oh, what's this all about? Curious. But there are some real super fans of Banana Ball, people who had jerseys of players, people who had made homemade signs, people that come from far and wide. I can't believe I'm saying this, but much in the way that you saw people travel around Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, like, you know, people come into faraway cities, you know? Yeah. You see that with Banana Ball. The local hotels are filling up. There's an economic impact upon the host cities.

9:12People are coming from far and wide to see it. And, yeah, they definitely have their super fans. Many of these super fans found the game online. In fact, you won't see any traditional ads for Banana Ball. I mean, Jess, one thing that's interesting is that they don't do advertising. You don't, like, turn on the TV and see, like, come on down and watch the Savannah Bananas. This is all, like, word of mouth. And if you're on social media, they're pretty impossible to miss. They have more followers on TikTok, Jess, than the Los Angeles Dodgers. That's how big this thing has gotten. Just for perspective, the Dodgers have 2 million followers on TikTok.

9:49The Bananas have 10 million.

9:54And although Banana Ball is already a viral sensation, its founder, Jesse Cole, has bigger dreams for the game. And Jesse Cole will say this, he is not a fan when people say, oh, this is a fad. The last thing he wants is for people to look back on 2025 as the year of the Savannah Bananas. He wants this to be built to last. After the break. We started with nothing. We were failing. It wasn't until we said, whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. So whatever you expect in a baseball game, we like to do something a little different. We hear from Jesse Cole himself about this short game's long game.

10:44Could you just, for our podcast audience, describe what you're wearing right now? I'm in a full yellow tuxedo with a yellow top hat. I own nine of them. I've been wearing them for over 10 years. It's kind of my signature look these days. Jesse Cole is everything you'd expect from a guy who started a sport called banana ball. He talks a bit like a carnival barker. There's trick plays, there's celebrations, there's dances, there's walk-ups. I want fans to never, if they blink, they may miss something. Jesse played baseball in college. But after an injury, he found himself mostly in the stands. As someone watching the game, I realized, you know, it was pretty slow, pretty long, pretty boring.

11:22And I just wasn't excited watching the game anymore. So, you know, started looking at all the parts of a baseball game that are too long, too slow, too boring. And, you know, batter stepping out of the box and mound visits and walks. So we started writing down ideas. And back in 2018, we played the first banana ball game behind closed doors. And since then, it's grown pretty well. But founding a sport and turning it into a phenomenon? Not an easy task. Jesse and his wife Emily started out in 2015 by buying a team from a minor league franchise in Savannah, Georgia. But it was a hard sell to get anyone to join their team or come to their events.

11:58My wife and I, we had to empty out our savings account. We were sleeping on an airbed. No one wanted to play for us. No one wanted to come see us. No one wanted anything to do with us. In fact, we actually had a free launch party with like, you know, steak and crab cakes and free alcohol. And only 70 people showed up. And in fact, the conference center felt so bad they didn't even charge us for it. That's how bad they felt. Like, even free events people didn't want. So they rebranded to something with better appeal. We decided to name the team the Savannah Bananas. And at that point, we got tons of criticism.

12:31You know, the owner should be thrown out of town. You're an embarrassment to the city. But people saw something. And everything changed when we became the Bananas. Even though our first shipment of T-shirts, there were too many N's in bananas. We literally misspelled our own name. Yeah, we misspelled our own name with our first shirt. So we've had missteps every step of the way, but the reality is that's where it started with the banana. And, you know, go bananas, to think differently, to have fun, to not take yourself too seriously. What is at the heart of Banana Ball? How is it different? Well, we've been described as the greatest show in sports.

13:04And so it is fun and joy. That's the heart of everything. And then really the spirit of our company is fans first, entertain always. We've learned a lot from Saturday Night Live, WWE, and Cirque du Soleil. And so who is coming up with a brand new show every single week? And so every Tuesday, we do OTT sessions, over-the-top ideas. We come up with 10 to 15 things we've never done in front of a live crowd. So we'll do a table read. We'll do live rehearsals. We do props. We do designs. We do all of that because we want people to see something that's truly remarkable every single night. Just to be clear, your games are, like, not rigged, right?

13:37They are true competition. People are trying to win. Yeah, the biggest comparison we get is the Harlem Globetrotters, but the Globetrotters always win. And, you know, we script the entertainment. There will be walk-ups. There will be dances. There will be scoring celebrations. There will be certain things. But what happens on the field, you can't script someone hitting a, you know, the other day we had a walk-off home run, unbelievable, in front of 45 ,000 fans. You can't script hitting a ball 420 feet. That's not that easy to script. Right now, there are four teams in banana ball. The Savannah Bananas, the Firefighters, the Party Animals, and the Texas Tailgaters.

14:10Jesse and Emily Cole own them all. How is business going? Are you making money? Yeah, yeah, we're very fortunate. And so, you know, we leave millions of dollars on the table. And that's what's unique. So our tickets are$40,$50, and$60 with no ticket fees, no convenience fees, no service fees. So we literally built our own ticket platform, our own ticket. So there's no fees and there's none of that. And, yeah, we only sell directly to fans. We also didn't have traditional sponsorship. We eliminated all the ads from our stadium in Savannah. We do all of our games for free on YouTube so we don't do traditional TV rights.

14:39You know, we're playing the long game. We're interested in long-term fans over short-term profits, and that's different than most businesses. Do you have a message to Major League Baseball? No, I have a lot of respect and admiration. I think they are on the right track. So just keep remembering why we played the game when we started. We played it to have fun. As a kid, we played it to have fun. And I think there's a value to fun. Once the world gets so, so competitive, I think it takes away the joy of the game. And I think there's a world that they both can exist, and that's what we're trying to create.

15:10My colleague Jason Gay says baseball has already made a few changes to make the game more fan-friendly. I don't think it can be directly attributed to banana ball, but some of the pace of play alterations that Major League Baseball has made in the last couple of years, whether it's the pitch clock, whether it's limiting mound visits by the manager, all the things that are sort of being done to speed things up, some of the things that people freaked out about but now kind of like because it moves the game along. Yeah, yeah. I think those have banana parts to them. They have shown a different way of doing things.

15:45And I don't think that there's any question that it's helped baseball.

15:52And so that's baseball. But can other sports learn something from banana ball? Well, I think one of the worst changes in sports over the past generation and a half has been the alienation of families. Because they've been priced out. You know, forget about the ticket prices, which are ridiculous. us parking hot dog oh my gosh the 20 hot dog soda pop beer yeah cracker jacks all those things right so people are fed up with that and i think that sports has been slow to react to it they've really oriented into the corporate fan experience they've really oriented into the luxury box kind of thing And I do worry about the effect that it has on the subsequent generations because, you know, how do you build tomorrow's sports fantasy?

16:38You got to bring them to the park now. You don't turn somebody into a sports fan at 40. They turn into a sports fan when they're young and they have those kinds of impressionable experiences when they're being brought to the park by a relative, family, friend, so on. And that's part of what was on Jason's mind as the banana ball game came to a close last weekend.

17:02and how did the how did the game end who won well i'm here to tell you that the bananas won i believe the final score golly this is this is actually indicative of what we're talking about though just that here i am a sports writer and i can't even tell you what the final score of the game was and yet i had a great time you know yeah maybe there's something to learn from that right that it's the experience that I took away from it. It's the sort of joy. A great night at the ballpark. I mean, you know, kind of what you want. Doing aerials all over the diamond before touching home to deliver the never-say-die bananas.

17:43That's all for today, Friday, August 8th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show's made by Catherine Brewer, Pia Gedkari, Carlos Garcia, Rachel Humphries, Sophie Cotner, Ryan Knudson, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singhi, Jivika Verma, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis, and me, Jessica Mendoza. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Theme music in this episode is remixed by Bobby Lord.

18:23additional music this week from katherine anderson peter leonard griffin tanner so wiley and blue dot sessions fact checking this week by kate gallagher thanks for listening see you monday