Editor's note: This story originally ran on June 17, 2021. Episode 1 of the new ESPN+ Original Series Bananaland is now available, and there are Banana Ball World Tour games on our air tonight (7 p.m. ET, ESPN2/ESPN+) and tomorrow (6:30 p.m. ET, ESPN+).

THERE'S A WAITLIST for "Banana Baby." The Savannah Bananas, a collegiate summer league team that routinely takes a sledgehammer to conventionality, begin each home game by wrapping an infant in a banana outfit and raising the baby to the sky like Simba. Up to 30 babies are usually waiting to partake in this ritual, some of whom haven't even been born yet. It is not uncommon for women to request placement on that list immediately after learning they are pregnant.

"Banana Baby" has become one of the team's most popular staples, but it also stands among its most conservative.

The Bananas once famously played a baseball game in kilts, then decided to make it an annual tradition. They employ a pep band and a dancing first-base coach. Their cheerleading squad, the "Man-Nanas," is made up of out-of-shape middle-aged men, and their dance team, the "Banana Nanas," consists of women in their late 60s. Their players routinely take part in choreographed dances, star in extravagant movie parodies and conduct postgame interviews inside of bathroom stalls. Since their inaugural season in 2016, the Bananas have staged an assortment of competitions in which fans dress in horse outfits, toss water balloons or repeatedly pie one another in the face.

It's baseball, but it's also part circus and part professional wrestling, with cruise-like entertainment and Harlem Globetrotter sensibilities -- and maybe Major League Baseball can learn something from it.

MLB finds itself at what increasingly feels like a breaking point. Games are longer than ever at a time when the world is moving faster than ever. The time between balls in play has never been greater, and the young fan has never been more elusive, a harsh reality that has triggered experimentation throughout the industry for a sport that is historically slow to change.

The Bananas, who operate out of the Coastal Plain League, sell out every game. Their TikTok account boasts more than 575,000 followers, more than any major league team. Their brand has somehow become national. The mastermind is a 37-year-old, yellow-tuxedoed iconoclast named Jesse Cole, a former collegiate pitcher who scoffs at the rigidities of professional baseball.

Today, he oversees an exaggerated version of what MLB strives to tap into -- an action-packed brand of baseball that encourages fun, doesn't take itself too seriously and resonates with a casual audience.

"All innovation is about falling in love with a problem," Cole said. "We saw a problem -- that people were saying baseball is too long, too slow, too boring. We said, 'How do we defeat that?' And so we started testing on that."

THE RULES FOR "Banana Ball" are as quirky as they are stringent.

"Banana Ball" was born out of a desire to keep fans engaged and incentivize them to stay. It was beta-tested with the players at Lander University in South Carolina in November of 2018, and the game felt faster than anyone envisioned. Nine innings were played in 99 minutes. The pitchers worked swiftly, the hitters eventually adjusted to staying in the batter's box and the pace quickened dramatically.

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The first "Banana Ball" game took place in the summer of 2019, but only in front of children. The Bananas did it in front of a regular crowd during an intrasquad game a year later but struggled to communicate the rules and explain the action in real time. The first play was a walk that turned into a sprint and, because the defense didn't know what to do, became a home run for Bill Leroy, a fourth-year catcher for the Bananas. Confusion abounded, but nobody left early. A survey that was distributed to fans came back overwhelmingly positive, the Bananas said, with many clamoring for "Banana Ball" against actual opponents.

"It was a lot of fun," Leroy said. "I feel like it's a lot different than traditional-style baseball. I love traditional baseball, but I like playing 'Banana Baseball.' I think it's a fun game to mix in, but not to play every day because I feel like it could get a little bit overwhelming."

The first time "Banana Ball" was played against a real opponent, in an exhibition later in the summer of 2020, the game ended with an epic showdown. When they did it again in the spring of 2021, someone batted in stilts. "Banana Ball" can't be played in the CPL, which is considered just one tier below the prestigious Cape Cod League as far as attracting promising collegiate talent. But Cole believes in the concept and its staying power.

"We will take 'Banana Ball' all over the world," he said. "I am very confident that we will play in cities all over the country, then all over the world, and we're gonna develop baseball fans, 'Banana Ball' fans, people that say, 'This is fun, this is different from anything I've ever seen.' We have a vision that that will be the future of the Bananas. A regular, traditional baseball game will not be the future of the Bananas."

THE RUG OF their duplex was so gross, so overrun by insects, that Jesse Cole and his wife, Emily, wore socks to sleep. One night, Emily woke up to the sight of a cockroach resting on Jesse's nose and screamed in terror. It was April of 2016. The couple had been married the prior October, five days after finalizing the purchase of the Savannah, Georgia, baseball team that had spent the previous nine years as a Class A affiliate of the New York Mets.

While at a friend's wedding at the start of 2016, their new COO called to inform them that the team's account had been overdrawn. They were more than $1 million in debt and in crisis before the first pitch of their ownership tenure. Emily, who first met Jesse while working for a minor league team in Augusta, Georgia, suggested what soon felt obvious:

They needed to sell their dream house in Charlotte, North Carolina, move to Savannah, empty their savings account and fully immerse themselves into this new venture. So they found a cheap apartment, set up an air mattress, ate off $30 a week and pushed to sell eccentric baseball to staunch traditionalists.

"We believed in it," Jesse said, "even though the community didn't."

Cole was a promising two-way player at Wofford College in South Carolina, but his playing career ended after a devastating shoulder injury. He landed an internship with another CPL team, the Gastonia Grizzlies, and became the team's general manager upon graduation, inheriting a franchise with mounting debt and scant attendance.

Sales calls went nowhere. The need for distinction quickly became obvious. Cole read every book he could find on Walt Disney, P.T. Barnum and Bill Veeck, the famously innovative and polarizing baseball owner. Their creativity became Cole's inspiration.

As Grizzlies GM, he incorporated choreographed player dances and introduced outlandish promotions -- "Flagellant Fun Night," basically a farting competition, or "Salute To Underwear Night," when free tickets were given to fans who displayed their tighty whities prominently -- and interest rose dramatically. In the fall of 2015, after the Savannah Sand Gnats of Minor League Baseball left town, Cole purchased an expansion CPL franchise to play in a suddenly vacant Grayson Stadium, a ballpark that dates back to the days of Babe Ruth. It functioned as a blank canvas for Cole's eccentric ideas.

His front-office team, consisting mostly of recent college grads, worked out of a storage facility and used an abandoned picnic table as a workstation. In the first two months, only one season-ticket package was sold. A big launch event was planned, the entire city was invited, and no more than 100 people showed up.

But the momentum began to turn when they announced their team name -- "Bananas," proposed by just one of the thousand or so fans who wrote in suggestions. Many in Savannah were disgusted, but the name trended on Twitter, garnered mentions on SportsCenter and Good Morning America and gave the team national recognition. The Bananas ultimately sold out 18 of their 25 home games and won the CPL championship in that inaugural season. They kept introducing new promotions, built a brand on social media, expanded their reach with offseason tournaments, found a way to host fans at 35% capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic and continually made decisions that benefited fans but, at times, undermined business.

All tickets, priced at $18, included unlimited food and soda. Shipping costs were waived for online orders. And advertisements were removed from the entire ballpark, the outfield wall reserved instead for fan signatures.

The team says it has sold merchandise in all 50 states and does at least one international order each week. The Bananas' broadcaster, Biko Skalla, who provides play-by-play for games that stream on Facebook, has received a variety of gifts from ardent fans, from dry-erase markers and mechanical pencils to homemade cookies and computer-animated portraits. When the team put tickets for its July games on sale early last week, 8,000 people were already on the waitlist.

The Bananas currently lead the CPL with a 12-1 record, and the organization swears that the unique environment maximizes the players' potential.

"What we, I think, are trying to prove to people is that you can have real baseball and you can have real fun and they don't have to exist separately," said Jared Orton, who joined Cole as his 24-year-old team president in 2016.

"These are real baseball players, some of the top college players in the country. There've been hundreds of players drafted out of our league, and it's a very competitive situation. They're here to win a championship, and they're here to have absolutely the best fun of their life, and we believe that they can exist together. And that's the mission we're on."

TY JACKSON, AN outfielder who was hilariously mic'd up recently, went to dinner a half-hour away from Savannah and couldn't get reservations. He walked in with a Bananas T-shirt, was asked if he played for the team, said yes and instantly got seated. His story is not unique.

"They treat us like celebrities, man," said Leroy, who once starred in a Bananas interview series from the bathroom called "Shooting The S--- With Bill Leroy." "Sometimes we're out on the town, just going to get some food or something, you have a Bananas shirt on, strike up a conversation, they figure out you play for them, and it's a free meal. It's really crazy how dedicated these fans are to really loving this team."

The Bananas' coaching staff, led by Tyler Gillum, sifts through more than 1,000 interested players each year. Gillum, 34, and in his fourth year with the Bananas, looks for hitters who can run, hit doubles and walk at least as often as they strike out. He looks for pitchers who can pound the strike zone while throwing in the upper 80s and lower 90s. And he looks for players with the personality and the willingness to entertain fans in a way none of their peers are required to.

"Some of the stuff that we do, some people might not like it," Gillum said. "But I tell you this -- when you get 500 fans that sit on the first-base side that don't like baseball but they show up and they see Maceo [Harrison], our dancing first-base coach, and they go absolutely nuts when he comes on the field -- I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and been like, 'You know, Gillum, I don't really like baseball but I love coming to a Bananas game.' You take that aspect of it, and now we're making more baseball fans. It's what we're doing. That's what Major League Baseball should be doing. It's what everybody should be doing is just figuring out how we can make more baseball fans along the way."

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Years ago, Bananas staff members challenged themselves to fill 17 two-minute voids over the course of each nine-inning game. They thought about radio and television and how dead time was inexcusable and applied the same approach to a baseball game, adding the time fans spend at the ballpark before the first pitch. It sprouted detailed scripts that account for every minute, from the moment fans leave their cars to the moment they leave the stadium.

They made it so that every member of the Bananas -- players, coaches, band members, dancers, cheerleaders -- greets fans when they first walk in and as they exit. They instituted pregame traditions like "Banana Baby" and "Home Run Hitter," when an inside-the-park home run is staged for a young fan. They came up with elaborate entrances for opening day -- in limousines, on trolleys, in armored vehicles -- and continually challenged themselves to push the boundaries on promotions.

Some fail epically.

One, titled "Crest On My Chest," was a competition that involved fans pouring toothpaste on a man's chest, scooping it with a brush and quickly discarding it elsewhere, causing a repugnant mess of chest hair on the field. Another, "The Human Piñata," subjected a man to a beating of pool noodles while dressed in a turtle costume. Another, "The Horse Race," produced a clutter of dizzy kids who kept colliding with each other, struggled to come off the field and delayed the start of the next half-inning.

"It has become a happening," said Frank Sulkowski, a sports anchor for the local ABC affiliate who has worked in the Savannah market for 16 years. "It's not just a baseball game; going to a Bananas game is a happening."

THE FIRST THING Cole does when he wakes up each morning is write someone a thank you letter. Then he writes a journal entry. Then he grabs his idea book and jots down 10 of them, most of which are related to the Bananas.

The top officials at MLB are also busy brainstorming.

The minor league levels are littered with new rules that have increased the size of bases, banned pickoffs, eliminated defensive shifts and implemented an automatic strike zone, all in an effort to create more action. For the second half of the Atlantic League's season, the pitcher's mound will move back a foot. Soon, major league umpires will become uber-aggressive in an effort to crack down on the use of foreign substances, which have produced unnatural spin rates.

Cole created a completely different style of baseball out of sheer necessity, as the owner of summer collegiate teams drowning in debt and fighting for relevance. He believes MLB should operate with similar urgency.

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"I would be very scared if I were Major League Baseball," Cole said. "Look at a company like Kodak, who dominated. And they had the opportunity, Kodak did, to do digital cameras. But no. They wanted to stay to their money-maker, their really big brand, and do what they did, and then everyone else came along and Kodak disappeared. Major League Baseball is not the only game in town. People get entertainment faster than ever. We're in a TikTok world, and Major League Baseball is in a three-hour-plus-game world. That's a problem."

Most of what the Bananas do is unrealistic for the country's top baseball league, of course. There's no chance a fan catch will ever count for an out in a major league game, that multimillion-dollar players will file out of their dugouts to dance, or that every ticket to Yankee Stadium will be all-inclusive. But Cole believes boisterous celebrations should be encouraged and that the average game time -- three hours and seven minutes for nine-inning games in 2021, on pace to tie the record that was set last year -- needs to be shaved by up to an hour, a circumstance that warrants drastic changes like the "Banana Ball" staple of calling an automatic strike when hitters step out of the box.

Most important, Cole believes, is paying attention to the people who attend games.

"I don't know if Major League Baseball watches their fans enough," Cole said. "If they watch a game and see that the people behind home plate are on their phones talking to their friends and not watching the game, there's a problem with the game. If they're seeing that the fans are leaving early every single night, there's a problem with the game. And they're afraid to do something about it. And I hate saying it, but it's the truth. We have the freedom that we're able to do things. We're not a billion-dollar brand. We're a small startup. But it makes it fun because we can experiment faster and do things faster than go through all this red tape. That's what's cool."

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2023-09-16 10:31:47