One of the craziest plays in sports history happened last week. Robert Anthony Cruz caught a fly ball in the outfield mid-backflip. Yep, mid-backflip. Now, why would a baseball player be doing a backflip while a ball was flying toward him? Well, he plays Banana Ball.
For those not immediately familiar with the term, Banana Ball is a new version of baseball created by the Savannah Bananas. The founder of the Bananas, Jesse Cole, owned a collegiate summer baseball team back in 2016. The team was struggling to get people into the seats of its small Savannah ballpark.
Cole, a former college baseball player, decided that if he wanted people to come to the game, he had to make the in-person experience more compelling. So he started incorporating skits and additional games into the game itself. He encouraged players to attempt trick plays whenever possible. He had pitchers lead full-fledged dance routines from the mound.
The ballpark in Savannah was no longer empty. There were no seats left to fill. Soon, the team had evolved so much that it needed to form an entirely new league around this style of baseball. And Banana Ball was born.
Then the pandemic hit, and another challenge began. So the teams took their dances and skits online, posting them all over TikTok. And the team exploded again.
Today, the league has multiple teams that play against the Bananas, including the Party Animals, the Firefighters, and the Texas Tailgaters. They play in some of the largest MLB and NFL stadiums in the country. And those games sell out, too. To get your hands on a ticket, the waitlist has grown to more than four million people. I would know. I joined it a few years ago.
I’ve been following the team’s journey for several years, and a few months ago, I finally got to experience Banana Ball for myself — including getting a behind-the-scenes look at how the whole thing operates.
And the entire operation is every bit as elaborate and well-oiled as I expected.
Cole reminds me of the modern-day P.T. Barnum. He has created a circus-like sport that blends genuine baseball talent with nonstop entertainment. He’s turned his players into influencer-athletes and, perhaps most impressively, figured out the secret formula to going viral.
But I went into this thinking the entire operation was ultimately about racking up views on social media. I realized I was wrong. The end goal isn’t internet fame. It’s getting those fans off their phones and into the stands. One billion fans, to be exact.
To do that, Cole has built the entire game around a fan-first mentality. He has customized virtually every part of the experience around what he thinks people actually want from a night at the ballpark. It feels like the exact experience you would want as a kid going to your first big game.
From the moment you walk in and get to meet your favorite players on the field, to the music, the pace of the game, the nonstop entertainment, and even the relatively affordable tickets, Cole has taken the elements he loves about baseball and transformed them into an entirely new kind of entertainment.
Of course, not everyone loves it. Some fans of traditional MLB are skeptical of the whole thing. And fair enough. But Banana Ball is a very different kind of game. It’s built for an era where attention spans are shorter, and entertainment is competing with the entire internet for your attention.
But I think Banana Ball belongs in a slightly different category than Major League Baseball. It’s closer to Cirque du Soleil or the Harlem Globetrotters — an entertainment experience built around an existing sport. And even though the rules and delivery are completely different, Banana Ball is doing something interesting: It’s giving an old game new attention from a younger generation.
Kids are picking up baseball bats because they fell in love with Banana Ball. And when viral content actually translates into kids playing the sport in real life, that’s a win.
Sometimes, I find myself feeling pretty jaded about internet virality. So much of what goes viral can feel disingenuous, irrelevant, or completely unworthy of the attention it receives. Refreshingly, Banana Ball feels different. The end goal isn’t the number on a phone screen. It’s the number of humans in the seats. Tens of thousands of people are sitting next to strangers, laughing, singing Coldplay, and experiencing something together.
In a culture where so much of our entertainment is consumed alone, through a screen, we need more of those moments, the kind that get people out of their houses and into the same place, cheering for something together. So when the Bananas come back to my city, you’ll know where to find me.
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