Savannah Bananas for the fun of it
Baseball for entertainment purposes – like batters fishing on stilts, catchers sitting on beanbags, umpires showing off surprisingly impressive dance moves. Banana ball takes everything dull or overly subtle about baseball and smashes it underfoot, while dancing to a pop song. The Savannah Bananas are a group often described as baseball’s Harlem Globetrotters. Originally a legit college summer league team, they got popular by playing sillier exhibition games under modified rules and before long they ditched the Coastal Plain League and went all in as a barnstorming troupe. They’re big on TikTok, and that brand awareness has translated into a bunch of sold-out stadium games with major celebrity cameos, like Ryan Howard picking up a bat (and striking out on three pitches) in Philadelphia. The Bananas’ social team wields a mastery of upbeat algorithmic content, with the Bananas churning out slick, completely inoffensive short-form videos that rack up views. Look at the baseball show; the umpires dance, too! Not only the umpires, The traveling team brings their senior citizen own cheer/dance team, called the Banana Nanas. Watch them in the video below.
Even with all their followers, however, the way they’ve translated this social-media success into real-life supersized crowds was pretty confusing to us. I was brave enough to volunteer to answer our questions definitively by watching Saturday night’s Banana Ball broadcast on ESPN2. It was the Bananas against their usual opponents, the Party Animals, in front of what was announced on TV as more than 70,000 at the NFL field in Nashville. And here’s one thing I liked: This guy did a flip while making a routine outfield catch. Neat! How was the rest of the game, you ask? Well, it’s everything in the Bananas’ zippy TikToks, padded out to two hours with all the additional time it takes to actually make them. That, at least, is the lesson of Savannah Bananas, the barnstorming team that has come up with a madcap version of baseball that is widely popular and selling out stadiums around the country. The Bananas, or the Nanners, as devotees call them, sold out Clemson University’s Memorial Stadium back in April, with 81,000 in attendance. Tickets for a couple of games at Yankee Stadium in September are selling on secondary sites at rates significantly higher than any regular Yankees game.
In Banana Ball, bunting is strictly prohibited and any attempt will get the offending batter ejected from the game. Then, there are walks. Who walks in a real sport? What is this, golf? In Banana Ball, after the pitcher issues a base-onballs, every fielder besides the pitcher and catcher has to touch the ball before the runner can be tagged out. This creates an incentive for runners to actually run out of the batter’s box, and very often they reach second base. Banana Ball, correctly, views incessant and unnecessary delay as the enemy of fan engagement. Batters can’t step out of the batter’s box. There are no visits to the mound. The game is timed and can’t last more than two hours. In loud and intense football stadiums, the fans are called “the 12th man.” In Banana Ball, the fans are literally the 10th fielder — if one of them catches a foul ball on the fly, the batter is out. “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America,” the French-American historian Jacques Barzun famously wrote, “had better learn baseball.” It is a popularization of baseball and advertisement for it, demonstrating how a game that is perceived as dull and uneventful can be the occasion for rollicking fun.
Ap-pealing Foul Balls
I couldn’t figure out why the baseball kept getting larger.
“Then it hit me.”
How does a Yankee fan change a lightbulb?
They don’t. They just talk about how great the past 27 were.
Doctor: Tell me about this dream that won’t stop repeating. What did you dream about last night?
Patient: Baseball.
Doctor: Don’t you dream about anything else?
Patient: What, and miss my turn at bat?
I just found out the kool-aid man plays on a baseball team.
He’s the pitcher.
They won’t be serving beer for the rest of the year at Chicago Cubs baseball games.
They lost the opener.
July 28th Birthdays
1999 – Victoria Baldesarra, 1985 – Tynisha Keli, 1988 – Ayla Brown, 1986 – Alexandra Chando,
1945 – Jim Davis, 1987 – Delquer Salmann, 1989 – Ryan Tannehill , 1969 – Dana White