If the Savannah Bananas were literally storming an actual barn right now, it wouldn’t stand a chance.
It feels like the “Greatest Show in Sports” has been everywhere in 2024, and it pretty much has been. The Bananas are on a world tour that will make stops in 29 cities and, hopefully, result in millions of tickets sold.
To say that it’s going well would be putting it mildly.
The Bananas have showcased their special brand of baseball—it’s loud, colorful, energetic, bat-[bleep] crazy and utterly delightful—in front of sold-out crowds at Fenway Park, Nationals Park and Progressive Field. And now they’re about to be on screens everywhere.
Starting with tonight’s 7 p.m. ET exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, the Bananas will be aired live on TruTV each of the next six Fridays. The broadcasts will also be streamed on the B/R app.
The Bananas were big even before all this, but now it feels much more real. Their virality has gone from the bubble-like confines of social media to the limitless expanse of the real world, transforming like Pinocchio from a wooden, string-bound puppet to a real boy.
For anyone who’s already a Bananas evangelist, it’s a treat. For anyone who’s not, well, you’re in for a treat.
The Bananas, Briefly Explained
A fun fact about bananas is that they aren’t like that in the wild. The soft, sweet fruits that we know and love are a domesticated breed, basically making them man-made mutants engineered to be more palatable to the average human.
I bring this up only because it’s the “I’d like to see a forklift lift a crate of forks” way of getting into how the Bananas have mutated baseball to their own delicious ends.
Founded in 2016 by yellow-tuxedoed owner Jesse Cole, the Bananas started out as a collegiate summer team in the Coastal Plain League. And they were a good one, winning the league title in 2016, 2021 and 2022.
Yet the Bananas also had a side hustle/eventual solo act as a barnstorming team, and one that played a brand of baseball specific to them: “Banana Ball.”
The balls, bats and bases are the iconography that confirms that the Banana Ball is, at its core, just another form of baseball. But with theirs, the name of the game is pure sensory overload.
A given Bananas show is liable to include former major leaguers, celebrities and the world’s tallest pitcher. The dances and scoring celebrations are wild, the side acts can be downright wholesome, and it’s entirely permissible. Indeed, it is expected that the action will feature trick pitches and trick catches.
In all, it’s as if somebody took Mike Veeck’s warped promotional mind and shot it up with a radioactive cocktail consisting of a circus, professional wrestling, a music festival and a Meow Wolf.
Yet there are actual rules:
Win the Inning, Win the Point: Games are won on points, and points go to whichever team scores the most runs in an inning. Except in the last inning, wherein every run counts as a point.
2-Hour Time Limit: No new inning can start when the clock hits zero.
No Stepping Out: Batters who step out have earned themselves a strike.
No Bunting: The act is grounds for automatic ejection.
Steals of 1st Base Are Allowed: The batter can take off for first on any pitch that gets by the catcher.
No Walks: If there is a ball four, the batter sprints out of the box and takes as many bases as possible, and every defensive player must touch the ball before attempting to tag the runner out.
No Mount Visits: They just slow things down.
Fans Are Defenders: If a fan catches the ball, it’s an out.
Showdown Tiebreaker: If the game is tied after nine innings or when time expires, it defaults to a one-on-one match between batter and pitcher, with only one fielder. The batter’s goal is to score, while the defense’s goal is to strike him out or at least keep the batter from scoring if they put the ball in play.
Fan Challenge: Any spectator can challenge any ruling.
Golden Batter Rule: A team can send any batter to hit at any spot in the lineup.
The rules sound crazy, and they are. But the important thing is that they’re crazy enough to work.
“It’s about making it more fun for the fans,” Bananas pitcher Andy Archer said during the team’s stop in Cleveland. “Just changing the rules like a two-hour time limit, and if the fan catches the ball, it’s an out. It feels like they’re a part of the game. It’s fans first at the end of the day. Everything we do has that fans-first mentality.”
The comparison to the Harlem Globetrotters is inevitable, but also imperfect if for no other reason than the Bananas can actually lose. Whereas the Washington Generals never beat the Globetrotters, the Bananas’ traveling partner (called “The Party Animals”) has pulled its share of Ws, including at Fenway Park.
A small one, perhaps, but it’s a part of what makes the Bananas experience so unique. And even in a boom time for baseball at large, that is what makes them so hard to look away from.
The Bananas Have Encroached on MLB’s Attention Monopoly
There is no monoculture anymore.
Various things that have always been popular still are, to be sure, but what was once a single land mass of shared interests has spent the last half-decade or so breaking up into so many individual islands. Culture, singular, has become cults, plural.
Attention remains a valuable currency, but it’s harder to get and harder still to maintain. And to this end, Major League Baseball and the Bananas have found two very different, yet clearly successful ways of keeping their attention coffers filled.
For MLB, adapting to the times meant accepting the shrinking attention spans. In 2023, the pitch clock, bigger bases, and shift limitations were introduced, all of which were intended to speed up games and make them more action-packed.
The success is undeniable. Nearly 30 minutes have been cut off the average game time from 2022 to 2024. Meanwhile, MLB is tracking toward averaging over 30,000 fans in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 2016 and 2017.
Yet whereas MLB met baseball fans where they are, the Bananas harnessed the power of memetics to craft their own following with almost surgical precision.
Research into what makes things go viral includes Professor Jonah Berger’s theory that it’s all about emotions that elicit “physiological arousal.” Amusement, for example, is basically jet fuel for sharing on social media.
The Bananas have always understood this, at least on an intuitive level. It’s hard to pin down where it all started—a 2017 Sandlot homage with nearly 250,000 views on YouTube is a likely suspect—but by now, there’s no denying the sheer variety of the team’s amusing moments or how far their virus has spread.
In fact, here’s some math: The 8.8 million follows the Bananas have on TikTok is 1.4 million more than the official MLB account, or exactly one New York Yankees’ worth.
It’s a victory made possible by the Bananas’ wisdom in not trying to beat MLB at its own game but instead playing one that MLB can’t possibly play.
Viral moments happen in major league games but are almost always organic. You can’t build a brand off that kind of randomness. Not like cultivating virality through creativity and consistency, and the Bananas have both mastered.
It’s the difference, say, between waiting for one banana tree to produce one delicious mutant and forcefully making it happen at scale, for the masses to enjoy.
The Bananas Have Left Their Mark, And It’s Permanent
The Bananas are calling what they’re on a “world tour,” but it’s more like a victory lap.
If a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame is the ultimate evidence of having left an indelible mark on the sport, then the Bananas’ mark was made official last fall when an exhibit in their honor opened in Cooperstown.
“We’re still in the first inning; like we are 1,000% still in the first inning. We’re just getting started,” Cole said last October, according to Adam Van Brimmer of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’ve had a heck of a first inning. But there’s a lot more game to play.”
He may be right. But like a cat only has nine lives, it’s hard to imagine the Bananas extending their lifespan much further beyond nine innings.
This is where the Globetrotters comparison reenters the chat as a warning. In their best days, they played in front of crowds as large as 75,000 and were a hit on TV, including with their own animated show. But while they’re still around today and no longer facing extinction, they’re not a cultural force anymore.
The same thing will probably happen to the Bananas someday. Theirs is an amusing act, but the novelty of it is a finite resource. On a long enough timeline, all fun gimmicks become tired shtick.
But then again, it’s OK to wave this off as something the Bananas can worry about later.
What they should be doing—and clearly are doing—is enjoying their victory lap.
Baseball didn’t ask for the Bananas, but it got them anyway. And it’s better for it.
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