The Savannah Bananas do play baseball, even if they have evolved the game beyond what Abner Doubleday envisioned in 1839. There are still four bases, points out Jesse Cole, the genius behind Savannah Banana Ball.
But the phenomenon, which has deep roots in North Carolina, has taken the country by storm by offering plenty of family-fun tweaks to the Grand Old Game.
Now in their fifth year, the Bananas have 10.2 million followers on TikTok, compared with the New York Yankees’ 1.7 million. Their videos get tens of millions of views. Television’s top-rated news show, “60 Minutes,” profiled the team in April. In June, the Bananas sold out the 75,000-seat Bank of America Stadium on two consecutive nights.
At the home of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, the Bananas competed against the Party Animals, who won one of the games.
Among the Bananas’ rules: teams earn 1 point for winning an inning, so the total number of runs doesn’t matter; hitters are declared out if a fan catches a foul ball; a hitter who draws a walk can run the bases until each defensive player touches the ball.
But the real show involves the players – and umpires – singing, dancing and turning routine plays into theater with backflips and hotdoggery. There’s even more pizzazz off the field, too.
“What people don’t understand is, the name of our company is Fans First Entertainment,” says Cole, who serves as master of ceremonies in a trademark yellow tuxedo and top hat. “Everyone sees all the social media, all the highlights, but they don’t always see the time that we spent in the upper deck creating fans’ first moments and how we deliver roses to little girls throughout the crowd and how we spent hours before and after the game signing autographs. That’s how you build fans.”
OLD COLLEGE TRY
Cole grew up in a small town about 25 miles south of Boston. His Bananas journey started when he arrived in Gastonia in 2008 at age 23, having suffered some heartbreak. His dreams of a major league baseball career were dashed with a shoulder injury as a pitcher at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
So he took a job as general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies collegiate summer league baseball team. He wasn’t dreaming yet of selling out stadiums from Anaheim, California, to Miami.
“That would’ve been impossible,” he says, two days before the Charlotte games. “The Gastonia team was failing. There were only a couple of hundred fans coming to the games. I had $268 in my bank account, so it was just about trying to find a way to make it successful and to get people to come to the games.”
He started studying P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney and found inspiration. “We saw a better way,” he says, donning the bright yellow tuxedo for the games.
The college guys played it straight on the field, but between innings had permission from Cole to bust a move. In the stands, fans took part in blindfolded pillow fights, kids smashed pies in their dads’ faces and toddlers raced turtles between innings while munching on “garbage lid nachos.”
Soon, the Gastonia team was averaging more than 2,300 fans per game. Cole bought the team in 2014 and, a year later, received approval for a new collegiate team in Savannah in the Coastal Plain League. The Bananas started play in 2016.
Things started slow in the Peach State. Cole and his new wife, Emily, nearly ran out of money. They missed payroll and had to sell their Gaston County house and move to Savannah to keep the team afloat. “We were sleeping on an air bed in 2016. We were grocery shopping on $30 a week.”
With antics like “Banana Babies” and “Banana in the Pants,” word spread. “After the failure in the beginning, we started selling out games. In 2017, we sold out every game, in 2018 we sold out every game,” says Cole.
He noticed, however, that no matter how much excitement occurred in the stands, fans were still leaving early at games following traditional rules. In 2018, he sold the Grizzlies. (They have since folded). And he started to think of what his team was doing in Savannah.
His answer was to found Banana Ball in 2021, and get out of the college-ball league. “You start small and dream big,” says Cole. “We started with a one-city world tour [in] Mobile, Alabama.” Then the Bananas did seven cities, followed by 33 cities around the nation.
Now, the team is selling out massive college and pro sports stadiums.
Overnight success? Hardly, says Cole. All of his mistakes have led to the sellouts at this season’s 100-plus-game schedule. He tells of how the team misspelled “banana” with an extra “n” in its first merchandise order.
“When you’re trying to do something new every day, you realize failure is not a scary thing,” says Cole. “Those failures help us get to the next step. We’re not afraid to come back up swinging.”
3 MILLION?
Cole still calls Belmont home. He and his wife, Emily, became foster parents in Gaston County in 2020 during the pandemic, eventually adopting two children they fostered. They continue to provide respite foster services, part of what keeps them in Gaston County.
Their passion for the 400,000 children in the U.S. without a permanent home has led to their Bananas Foster nonprofit, which raises awareness and money for foster programs at every Bananas event. “It’s about bringing people together and bringing families together,” he says.
As for scaling his business, the Coles plan to start a Bananas’ League next year. He declines to discuss financials, saying that’s not his focus.
“We’re not interested in being a billion-dollar company, we want to create a billion fans,” he says. “I mean, we’re serving
2.2 million fans this year, so literally 2.2 million fans are buying tickets.(They started at about $40 for the Charlotte games.) How can we serve 3 million next year?
“If we take care of the fans, the revenue takes care of itself.”
In Gastonia, the Grizzlies played at Sims Legion Park, a 1950-era ballpark where fans sometimes had to avoid pigeon droppings that often covered the bleachers.
“I don’t remember anything like that,” Cole shoots back. “I remember the Flatulent Fun Night. I remember the Dig to China Night. I remember Midnight Madness. I remember the Grandma Beauty Pageant.
“I don’t remember anything with the pigeon poop. That must’ve been before my time.” ■