Nationals Park will host the barnstorming baseball league’s inaugural title game.
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When Jesse Cole opens his banana-yellow notebook and rattles off the handwritten thoughts within, the avalanche of ideas proves delightfully dizzying. Is this a madman’s brainstorm? A word association session? Some sort of slam poetry?
As the owner of the barnstorming Savannah Bananas baseball team, Cole is always dreaming up concepts for his adrenaline-fueled, irreverence-packed spin on our national pastime that’s equal parts sports, musical theater and circus act. Now that “Banana Ball” has ripened into a six-team circuit — sending more than 3 million fans to 75 stadiums across 45 states this year — the league’s commissioner knows he must keep the crowd-pleasing antics coming.
The season culminates in the inaugural Banana Bowl title game Saturday at Nationals Park. But during a mid-September video chat, ahead of two regular season games in Detroit, Cole had Michigan on his mind.
“You’ve got ‘Eight Mile,’” he says, citing Eminem’s Motor City anthem. “So we found eight people named Miles, and they’re going to run around the bases.” Name-checking Motown and the Temptations, Cole then floats a “My Girl”-themed daddy-daughter dance-off. Not to exclude Diana Ross, he riffs on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and pitches a weightlifting contest for mothers called “Ain’t No Mamma Strong Enough.”
And Cole continues to spew ideas. Some are ingenious. Others are inscrutable. Cole, sporting his trademark yellow tuxedo in his Charlotte office, relishes them all.
“My dad always told me when I was a kid, ‘Swing hard in case you hit it,’” he says. “That kind of stuck with me.”
The Banana Ball Championship League, after all, is nothing if not one big swing after another. Whether you’re watching the flagship Savannah Bananas squad or one of five teams formed to fill out the league — the Party Animals, the Firefighters, the Loco Beach Coconuts, the Indianapolis Clowns and the Texas Tailgaters — the experience is the same.
It’s a fast-paced brand of baseball, stripped of timeouts and mound visits and other unwieldy stoppages. A countdown clock caps games at two hours. An innovative scoring system guarantees that every contest comes down to the final inning. Players wear traditional button-up jerseys, yes, but also capes, cowboy hats and stilts. The genuinely gifted athletes make trick plays — think behind-the-back catches and baserunning backflips — look routine. The breaks between innings are filled with choreographed dances, comedy sketches, live music, celebrity cameos and whatever else Cole has jotted down in that notebook.
Considering that Cole prefers the word “show” over “game” when discussing Banana Ball contests, it’s no surprise that he has long imagined his league’s own version of the Super Bowl spectacle. When the Savannah Bananas meet the Texas Tailgaters in the Banana Bowl, airing live on YouTube and Disney+, the bout will not just decide the first Banana Ball championship — it will also bring all six teams to D.C. to perform.
“It’s going to be the biggest show, craziest show, most fun show that we’ve ever done by far,” says Savannah Bananas head coach Tyler Gillum. “I’m excited about that challenge.”
Cole, 42, imagined getting to a different show — Major League Baseball, to be specific — when he pitched for Wofford College in South Carolina two decades ago. After a shoulder injury put that dream to bed, he pivoted to the front office and took over as the 23-year-old general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies, a summer squad for college baseball players in suburban Charlotte.
Disillusioned by baseball’s leisurely pace and stubborn commitment to tradition, Cole tossed out the rule book while trying any and everything to seduce fans over 10 years in Gastonia. The grandma beauty pageants went over particularly well, he recalls. So did the dunk-the-GM promotions. When the minor league team in Savannah, Georgia, moved away in 2015, Cole saw an opportunity to build a club in a town rich with baseball tradition. A year later, he and his wife, Emily, launched the Savannah Bananas as a collegiate summer team in the Coastal Plain League.
“You put yourself in the fans’ shoes and you say, ‘All right, what are the boring parts?’” he says. “‘What are the slow parts? Is this fun? Would this make us laugh? Is this different?’ Whatever’s normal, do the exact opposite.”
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Look around Cole’s Charlotte office, past the dozen-plus yellow tuxes in his closet and the matching top hats strewn about, and you’ll see plenty of nods to his two biggest influences: Walt Disney and P.T. Barnum. Their quotes adorn the walls. Books about them fill the shelves. A sketch of each impresario is framed and mounted. “They created worlds of joy and happiness,” Cole marvels. For the past decade, he has aimed to follow suit.
Yet Cole understood there were limits to how much the Bananas could bend baseball to their will in an established league. In 2022, the franchise left the Coastal Plain League and subsequently loaded up its schedule with exhibitions across the country. And this year marked the launch of the Banana Ball Championship League, with a half-dozen teams, a 61-game regular season and proper standings.
Although Banana Ball draws comparisons to the Harlem Globetrotters or WWE, its games are decidedly unscripted. But the talent is quite real, with rosters largely composed of former college and minor league players, as well as the odd ex-MLB veteran. (Boston Red Sox favorite Jackie Bradley Jr. plays outfield for the Clowns, a revitalization of the barnstorming Negro Leagues team.)
“A lot of people think what we’re doing is fake,” says Nick Wilson, a pitcher for the Clowns. “But we are all straight-up competitors, and we all want to play the game at the highest level, and we’re not going to compromise our competitiveness for a show.”
Banana Ball is played under an ever-evolving set of rules. Teams get only one point for winning an inning — until the final frame, when each run finally counts as a point. The team that racks up more trick plays can earn an extra point. If a fan catches a foul ball, that’s an out. Where traditional baseball has walks, Banana Ball has swapped in sprints.
“If you try to treat it like baseball, it’s not going to work out because the game is just so fast,” Wilson says. “You have to treat it like it’s a different sport.”
Then there’s the barrage of gleeful gimmicks. Flip on a Banana Ball game (they’re all free on YouTube) and you might see a home-plate umpire getting his groove on between pitches, or a funeral for a broken bat. The likes of John Cena, Kristen Bell and Eli Manning have dropped in on the festivities to perform. Last year, the Bananas served as backup dancers for the rock band the All-American Rejects at Boston’s Fenway Park. Derek Klena, a Tony-nominated Broadway actor, has made show tunes a staple since signing with the Bananas last winter.
“Our company’s name is Fans First Entertainment, and every decision we make filters through the question: ‘Is this fans first?’” Gillum says. “We are trying to create the most competitive and entertaining sport in the world.”
So how did Nationals Park end up with Banana Ball’s marquee event? Although the Atlanta Braves and the Boston Red Sox expressed an interest in hosting the Banana Bowl, the timing proved tricky when it became clear that those teams would make the MLB playoffs. Rallying around Banana Ball as a decidedly nonpartisan unifier, Cole kicked around the idea of taking the game to D.C. The Washington Nationals’ postseason absence didn’t hurt, of course.
“I believe Banana Ball has helped bring the nation together, and there’s a reason why it’s at the nation’s capital,” Cole says. “It’s the most ambitious, daunting and scariest thing we’ve ever done — and it’ll be the most rewarding as well.”
Eyeing a celebration akin to the Super Bowl halftime show, Cole teases a song-and-dance spectacular before the final inning of the sold-out Banana Bowl. He also says Benj Pasek and Justin Paul — the EGOT-winning songwriters behind “La La Land,” “Dear Evan Hansen” and “The Greatest Showman” — have written tunes for the occasion. (The duo already helped pen “Show Starts Now,” the Banana Ball anthem sung by Klena.)
Oh, yes — and the Bananas or Tailgaters will be crowned the first Banana Bowl champion. But remember Cole’s motto: “Whatever’s normal, do the exact opposite.” If MLB fans live and die with their teams, Cole would rather that Banana Ball fanatics laugh the night away.
“It’s so much more than who wins the game,” he says. “That’s what Banana Ball is about: If your team wins or loses, even in the biggest game of all, we hope you leave and say, ‘That was unbelievable.’”
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