The Savannah Bananas needed a bigger stage

Getting tickets to Savannah Bananas games over the last few years has been so difficult that the barnstorming baseball team has drawn comparisons to Taylor Swift. And like Swift, the Bananas, who have danced their way to national stardom, will be taking their act from intimate venues to almost exclusively giant stadiums in 2025.

If you missed seeing the team in Hartford, Connecticut, or Des Moines, Iowa, or any other minor league baseball city over the last few years, you will be able to catch them in 2025 at Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park and even a few NFL stadiums that can accommodate upward of 70,000 fans a game.

The changes, which were announced Thursday during a charmingly lo-fi “draft” of the Bananas’ 2025 schedule that streamed on YouTube, will open the team to thousands of new fans, many of whom had been shut out of the team’s ticket sales in the last few years. But it has also led to some fretting among longtime supporters who are used to seeing the team in stadiums half as large.

“My first and biggest concern is that they will lose the fan interaction,” said Cory Mickelson, 48, a fan from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and a member of the K Club, an exclusive fan group run by the team. “It’s a lot easier to interact with 9,000 people versus 40,000-plus in a massive stadium with multiple decks. The experience will not be the same.”

But, he added, “I have no doubt the Bananas will figure out a way to make the experience just as good as the smaller stadiums.”

The Bananas, for anyone still unfamiliar, are a team that travels around the country putting on events that are something between a Harlem Globetrotters show and an actual baseball game. The score is real, and the Bananas might very well lose on any given night, but there is also a twerking umpire, and one of Savannah’s players pitches and bats exclusively on stilts. There are cameos from ex-major leaguers, a list of rules that exist only in Banana Ball, and an outfielder doing a back flip while making a catch is almost a nightly occurrence.

In 2024, the team’s unique blend of sports and entertainment was played in 29 cities, drawing a total of more than 1 million fans — more than the home attendance of the Oakland Athletics, an MLB team. In 2025, the team expects to play in 18 MLB stadiums, two NFL stadiums and one college football stadium, with overall attendance expected to double.

The fear of change is understandable, and a post by Mickelson on a Facebook page dedicated to the K Club drew hundreds of comments expressing similar sentiments, likening the whole thing to a band you used to see in tiny clubs suddenly playing stadium shows.

Jesse Cole, the co-owner and creator of the Bananas, said that the changes were made in response to an overwhelming demand for tickets — the wait list for tickets had grown to 3 million fans — and that the team will still be able to offer things that no MLB team can, regardless of the stadium’s size.

“These are things that people have never seen before on a baseball field and in a major league stadium,” he said in a phone interview Friday. “To see a star player interacting with the fans, running through the crowd, celebrating with the fans, is still something very unique. And we just use the video board so that if someone is in the center field, upper deck or high up, they can still see it and experience it.”

The 2025 season will begin in February, with three games at modest spring training facilities in Arizona and Florida, but from that point forward the Bananas will play exclusively in MLB stadiums and football stadiums on the road, while their home games will continue to be at the 5,000-seat Grayson Stadium in Savannah, Georgia.

Fans outside Georgia who enjoy smaller venues are not entirely out of luck, though, with three other Banana Ball teams, the Party Animals, the Firefighters and the Texas Tailgaters, headlining games across the country, mostly in minor league or college stadiums. Those games, however, will not feature the Bananas.

While the shift to larger parks is notable, far bigger changes were also announced Thursday. The Bananas, who began as a competitive collegiate summer league team in 2016 before moving exclusively to the Banana Ball style in 2022, will headline the Banana Ball Championship League in 2026, which is an attempt to create an actual league with a championship on the line.

Cole said that decision, like everything else with the Bananas, was a reaction to what the team was hearing from fans, with some expressing reservations that it’s “just a show” — a notion clearly dispelled when the Bananas lost to the Party Animals in front of a sold-out crowd at Fenway Park in June.

“I believe we have an opportunity to create a sport that can have more kids playing, more kids watching,” he said of the attempts to expand Banana Ball. “A lot of people, business leaders, they look at the next quarter. I’m looking at the next quarter-century, and that’s what I’m focused on.”

As for how the stakes of a longer schedule, with playoffs and a championship, will affect the team’s ability to lean in on the dances and gags that made them famous, Cole did not seem concerned, offering the advice he frequently shares with players.

“You’re not going to be known for your missed trick plays,” he said. “You’re going to be known for your epic trick plays.”

He added: “To be a legend, to be a hero, to win the championship game with a back-flip catch with the game on the line, that’s a pretty amazing moment. And I think our guys are going to go for it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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