The last time the Kansas City Royals sold out two back-to-back home games at Kauffman Stadium was the 2024 playoffs. But the Savannah Bananas did so in two random evenings last May. I was in attendance for one of those games, where the Bananas played the Firefighters in a brisk two-hour event, dictated as such by their own bespoke rules.
If you haven’t at least heard of the Savannah Bananas, you either don’t follow baseball whatsoever or don’t use social media. For those few of you who aren’t aware
about this team’s particular antics, the Bananas are an entertainment group that plays a version of baseball called Banana Ball, where bunts are illegal and foul balls can be caught by fans for an out (among other rules, like the aforementioned two-hour playtime rule).
The Bananas are a sensation. They play in sold-out shows not just in Kansas City, but across the country. And those sales figures, combined with the fact that the Bananas have more TikTok followers than any MLB team or the MLB official account, has prompted some hand-wringing from baseball insiders about what the league can do to copy the Bananas.
Some history is in order, though: the Bananas began life in 2016 as an independent team in the Coastal Plain League, a wood bat collegiate summer baseball league. Two years later, they started playing exhibition games with their funky rules. And after five years with feet in both worlds, they committed fully to Banana Ball in 2023, eschewing their former life as a competitive baseball team.
There are some Bananas haters out there. I’m not one of them; although I was gifted tickets to the game in May, I picked up a Savannah Bananas hat while I was there and enjoyed myself. It was fun, and it was fun to watch families have fun.
That, I think, is the most replicable part of the Bananas process. They have a fan-first mindset, and they care about offering an affordable, fair in-person viewing experience. And to build fans, they stream all their games–for free–on YouTube. Imagine if MLB and all their teams did that.
Some of the other things that the Bananas do isn’t really replicable. Banana Ball isn’t being played to be won; it’s being played to be enjoyed. Though there is the trappings of competition, nobody cares what the result of the game is.* You can do a lot of other stuff if you don’t care about winning or losing.
*Side note: the Bananas desperately need a foil, bad guys to play against. That they do not have any contributes to this lack of competition or meaning.
This filters to the field, where players are optimized to be entertainers rather than baseball players. If you’re interested in particularly good baseball, you won’t get it here. These players are, by and large, not good enough to cut it for Minor League Baseball, and they look like it. On a pleasant May evening for instance, there wasn’t a single batted ball that even went to the warning track on the night that I went.
I think my biggest criticism of the Banana experience was that it’s built as a constant deluge of sights and sounds. Pitches get thrown immediately after the ball is back in the pitchers’ hands. Players dance and the game resumes before they’re back in their position. The video board was in overdrive. And throughout it all, a different song blared through the loud speakers roughly every 10 or so seconds. Let me focus on one thing for a bit!
Banana Ball is a fun, family-friendly experience. But it’s not competitive baseball, and it’s not really even good baseball, and you can’t scale it to 162 games a year without significant diminishing returns. That’s ok–a lot of things are fun, and a lot of things have elements of baseball, and some even have both, like Banana Ball. I just don’t think it’s some revolution for how the sport will be or should be played. That’s ok, too.
