THERE IS A WAITING LIST to be a “Banana Baby”. The Savannah Bananas, a summer league varsity team that routinely takes a hammer to the conventional, kicks off each home game by swaddling a baby in a banana suit and raising baby to heaven like simba. Usually up to 30 babies wait to participate in this ritual, some of whom have not yet been born. It is not uncommon for women to request a spot on that list immediately after learning that they are pregnant.
“Banana Baby” has become one of the team’s most popular staples, but it is also among the most conservative.
Once the Bananas played a baseball game in Kilts, and then they decided to make it an annual tradition. They employ a cheer band and a first base coach who dances. His cheer squad, the “Man-Nanas, “is made up of out-of-shape middle-aged men and their dance team, the”Banana Nanas, “is made up of women in their sixties. Their players usually participate in choreographed dances, star in wacky movie parodies and conduct post-game interviews inside the bathrooms. Since their inaugural season in 2016, the Bananas have hosted a variety of competitions in which fans dress up in horse outfits, throw themselves water balloons, or repeatedly hit each other with cakes in the face.
It’s baseball, but it’s also part circus and part professional wrestling, with cruise ship entertainment and Harlem Globetrotters sensibilities, and maybe Major League Baseball can learn something from that.
MLB is 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 longer, and the young fan has never been more elusive, a harsh reality that has sparked industry-wide experimentation with a sport that has historically slowly changed.
The Bananas, which operate out of the Coastal Plain League, sell out at every game. His TikTok account has more than 575,000 followers, more than any major league team. His brand has somehow gone national. The mastermind is a 37-year-old iconoclast in a yellow tuxedo named Jesse Cole, a former college pitcher who pokes fun at the rigidities of professional baseball.
Today, he oversees an exaggerated version of what MLB strives to harness: 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 said that baseball is too long, too slow, too boring. We said, ‘How can we beat that?’ So we started testing that. “
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