Mike O'Connell

^{The Savannah Bananas logo outside Grayson Stadium in Savannah.}

(The Sports Fan Project Circle of Champion member, Michael O’Connell Jr., shares his experience at the recent Banana Bowl between the Texas Tailgaters and Savannah Bananas at Washington, D.C.’s Nationals Park. This piece originally appeared on Michael’s blog, which you’re able to find at mikeoconnelljr.com.)

I’ve always been the guy who insists that if you’re not an hour and a half early to any sporting event… you’re late.

Admittedly, my family members have not always appreciated this sentiment.

A few days ago at Nationals Park, though, they were literally running at full enthusiasm from the train stop to the stadium gate for a 7:00 game … at 5:30!

Calling it a sporting event, though?

Either a stretch or an outright lie, depending on whom you asked or perhaps at what point in the evening.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Last Saturday night I was at Nationals Park, right down the road from me in Washington, D.C., to witness the inaugural “Banana Bowl,” the title game for the Banana Ball Championship League.

You know, the Savannah Bananas and company.

I’ve spilled much ink about the Bananas before, and all of the analogies and superlatives still hold, though I suppose I’m now calling my evening at Camden Yards last August the second-greatest show I’ve ever seen. Last Saturday topped it by a bunch (that’s banana talk), and short of the Rapture itself, I don’t think this one will ever succumb to another. At times it was admittedly too much, a sensory overload that had me thinking not of baseball but of the Emperor in Amadeus… too many notes.

^{At left, a look into the outfield at Grayson Stadium in Savannah. Merchandise makes the Banana Ball world go round, don’t you know.}

Amidst the dancers and acrobats and sword-swallowers, remember, there was a champion to be crowned.

It had been more than 30 years (I think) since I last attended a championship game in any sport, and I’m using the term sport as loosely as I can. No one was taking this too seriously, and there were so many baseball-adjacent sideshows and noise; somehow it was five or six minutes into the game before I realized they’d started. With no rules but self-imposed ones, and seemingly an unlimited budget, Banana Ball Inc. put on a show beyond the Globetrotters, beyond P.T. Barnum, beyond the Grateful Dead. Maybe if Caligula were in charge of Woodstock.

And he sold togas for 200 bucks a pop.

To be honest, I’m not really sure what they sold in those pop-up tents that served as souvenir shops. Every single one had a line a mile long, and this was an hour before the game started. We were through the gate by 5:45 for a 7:00 game, and my God, the place was already packed. I’ve been to Nats games where most of the stadium is empty, and they shut down half the concession stands because there’d be no point. Hopefully Nationals Inc. picked up a few tips.

I can’t even imagine the gross receipts on a night like this for the Bananas. And for better or worse, they’re basically a non-profit organization, because they must put every dime right back into the operation. We were treated to a cavalcade of famous guests from all areas of arts and entertainment, from skydiving paratroopers right down to (literally) John Cena hopping out of an army vehicle. I’d love to know the total number of Grammys, Emmys, Olympic medals, Purple Hearts, and various other public accolades achieved by those who stepped on the field during the game, whether to sing a song, take a few hacks, or just wave to an adoring crowd.

All to the soundtrack of eight-second clips of your favorite rock ‘n’ roll hits. Oh, and there’s a kind of baseball game going on too.

At the end of the sixth inning (I think–it was hard to keep track of the innings), a Banana Ball staff member approached our section and had everyone follow her out of our rows and down into the bowels of the stadium. Past security, past the National Guardsmen, past Dick Cheney’s bunker (I think that’s what it was), and into… the Nationals bullpen. Seriously. We were standing in the Nationals bullpen. (I was very tempted to pick up the phone; I mean, there it was just sitting there.) Various Banana Ball employees were shouting instructions at us (I was worried it was some kind of coordinated dance routine), all to no avail because by then the soundtrack was up to 11. But one moment we were watching the game and the next we were being hustled onto the field. Down the ramp and onto… the field. (The Bananas are famous for getting fans engaged, but this was taking it to a whole other level. Literally.) My first time actually stepping on a Major League Baseball field, and yeah, it and the bullpen were at different grades. Did I mention it was in the middle of the game? Anyway, there I am standing in centerfield, too dumbfounded even to operate my phone’s camera function, and I find myself part of a line of people holding up a thin rope. There were two lines, actually, and we’d made a walkway of sorts for a few folks coming towards the infield from straightaway center. Three young men, actually, and I’m told they are brothers. The Jonas Brothers, who are playing a few tunes as part of a surprise concert.

Holy shit!

The final notes are still ringing, and we’re hustling off the field like the Beatles circa 1964. Actually, the whole thing reminded me of Beatlemania, and the stories I’ve heard that you couldn’t even really hear the music, just the shrieks of 14-year-old girls. Except in this case those shrieks were coming from your otherwise heimish neighbors now under the Banana Ball spell. The whole thing is a St. Vitus Dance, some of it actually choreographed and involving high-level professional athletes.

Speaking of athletes, remember there was a game to be played and a champion to be crowned.

Fast-forward to the bottom of the ninth inning, and the Bananas have a chance to walk off with a win. Funny that the D.C. walk-off master himself, Nationals legend Ryan Zimmerman, had actually pinch-hit for the Bananas earlier in the game (against Jordan Zimmermann of all people), but I guess in such cases one lets the rules maintain some integrity. Bananas don’t score in the bottom of the ninth, meaning the game goes to a “Showdown.” (You can’t make this stuff up.)

The visiting Texas Tailgaters bat first and secure a point with a successful hit in the one-on-one showdown, putting the pressure on the Bananas to match or go home. Mighty Casey was at bat for Savannah in the person of fan favorite (they’re all fan favorites) Danny Oberst, who, for the second time in the game, had a chance to be a hero. Like Casey, he fell behind early, and alas, like Casey, his mighty blow met only the D.C. night air. Proof that they don’t script these things, the Tailgaters won the game and the championship, and a giant-ass chair they get to tote around with them all next season. Yeah, that actually was the trophy: a giant throne very much befitting the evening and the entire Banana Ball experience.

If given the opportunity, I’d do it all again in a D.C. minute.

And I’d be sure to get there early.

Texas Tailgaters Team Photo — **^{The Texas Tailgaters celebrate their Banana Bowl Championship. (Photo by Banana Ball)}**

The Savannah Bananas — **^{Savannah Bananas players entertain the Baltimore crowd at Camden Yards Saturday evening. (Photo from the @thesavbananas Instagram)}**

(Editors Note: Attending a Savannah Bananas game is on my list of the 80-ish events I aim to attend during my Around the World in 80 Sporting Events project. That said, I’m beginning to realize winning the recent lottery for those Masters tickets might have been easier than winning one for the Bananas. Like The Masters, millions enter but few win. The secondary market to see them has prices in the stratosphere as well. Mike O’Connell, friend of The Sports Fan Project, sold a kidney or something and managed to attend with his son this past Saturday at Baltimore’s Camden Yards. He posted the following dispatch on his website (mikeoconnelljr.com) earlier and told us we’re able to share it with our audience. If you’re interested in learning a bit more about the Savannah Bananas remember that co-founder Emily Cole joined us on Conversations with Sports Fans late last season [S:3, E:70].)

They call it the greatest show in sports.

The question for me, before seeing the Savannah Bananas in person for the first time, was whether I was watching a show or whether I was watching sports.

Turns out I was.

It was the greatest show I’d ever seen.

And the greatest sporting event.

In case you’ve been hiding in a cave on Mars or some such thing the past few years you have no doubt heard of the Savannah Bananas, the barnstorming baseball team known for its in-game antics and flouting of all traditional baseball rules. In fact, they don’t even advertise their performances as baseball. This is Banana Ball, and judging from the reaction of 45,000 fans at Camden Yards in Baltimore this past Saturday night, baseball as we know it may be over. Blockbuster Video, cable TV, the horse and buggy, quill pens, and baseball.

The brainchild of Jesse Cole, a former pro prospect himself, the Savannah Bananas were once a traditional baseball team. (It’s a little like noting that Hugh Hefner was a copy editor for Esquire.) From 2016 to 2022 they played in the Coastal Plain League, a wood-bat collegiate league in the Carolinas and Georgia similar to what happens every summer in Cape Cod. The team had success under Cole, winning the CPL championship in its first year of existence, but it was the show that got people’s attention. Sure, goofy on-field promotions between innings happen at every minor league and summer league stadium, but the Bananas had the players involved, the fans involved, and even the umpires involved in what was slowly developing into something beyond baseball. It’s beyond Dylan going electric. It’s beyond Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. It’s more like the first time some hillbilly in about 1935 hooked his guitar up to an amplifier, cranked it to 10, and a bunch of slack-jawed yokels stood around the swamp like what the hell is that?

And it kind of changed music – and baseball – forever.

After the 2022 season the Bananas left the CPL (after winning back-to-back titles), finally giving up all pretense of playing traditional baseball. (They’d been playing regular games on the regular schedule and doing the barnstorming thing on the side.) Turns out this was a pretty good move, as for the last three seasons the Bananas have been not only selling out Major League parks, but moving concessions and merchandise every night like Major League teams only dream about. (People were literally tripping over one another to shell out for souvenirs as Eutaw Street became Shakedown Street.) Actually, that notion occurred to me quite often, that MLB teams look at what the Bananas do and think, Damn, why didn’t we think of that!?

A few modest examples for the uninitiated.

The famous (and sometimes infamous) “Kiss cam” at stadia around the country? No Kiss cam here. They’ve got actual couples who take the field and engage in, well, they engage as couples do, and the audience votes by cheer who should win.

Of course it’s a gag and it’s all staged, and of course I didn’t realize this at first.

Couple #1, who said they’d been married a year and a half, began with an attractive but mild kiss.
Couple #2? They’d been married 20 years and went a little more PG. It was then I realized it was a setup.
Bring on Couple #3 (a.k.a. someone’s grandparents), who said they’d been married 49 years. Their smooch, lasting the first dozen bars or so of Etta James’s “At Last” over the PA, got the most deafening applause I have ever heard. Teams have their cheering sections, but everyone roots for Grandma and Grandpa.

That’s the genius of the Savannah Bananas. They get the crowd involved. The couples in the kissing contest probably really were just plucked from the crowd (and coached on how the game would go), as were the dozen or so other attendees who made it onto the field for the various other gags and promotions. Most of the selectees were under six years old, and who isn’t going to go nuts for a little kid out there? (One of them was literally a three-year-old girl peeling a banana–you’d have thought it was Mick Jagger out there.) My favorite? A kid and his dad in a little exhibition called “Hose My Dad.” You can imagine how this goes …


Announcer: So kid, would you like this cheap prize? Or would you like to spray your dad with a firehouse we’ve brought out onto the field?

Kid: Hose my dad.

(Kid sprays hose. Wild roar from the crowd.)

Announcer: Okay, kid, how about this nicer prize?

Kid: Hose my dad.

(Kid sprays hose. Crowd erupts like it’s the seventh game of the World Series.)

Announcer: Okay, kid, last try… this awesome prize, or hose my dad?

Kid: Hose my dad.

(Crowd doesn’t even wait for the water, just starts going insane. Kid walks away all three prizes anyway. And a very wet dad.)

Oh, there was baseball too. And sometimes one forgets that these guys (and girl–we saw former Cal State softball star and sort of a Jackie Robinson of women in pro baseball Kelsie Whitmore come in to pitch) really are great players. Most of them I imagine are just a few years out of college, and though they might have been pretty good in the NCAA they maybe didn’t get quite the draft position or signing bonus they were expecting. If they’ve got a talent (like, gee, I don’t know, the guy who plays while walking on stilts), there may be a spot for them in Banana Ball. One guy wears a cape, one guy wears a motorcycle helmet, one guy plays without a shirt … you get the idea. You’ve got to have a little style out there. Like, catching a flyball while doing a backflip. Yup. And infielders tend to catch balls behind their backs. They count on the scoreboard as “trick plays,” though it was never really explained how those factor into anything. (I guess “real” baseball keeps dozens of ultimately worthless stats too. Runs are the thing that determine the winner, not any of that other jazz.) The standard comparison for the Bananas is to the Harlem Globetrotters, and yeah, the comparison has a kernel of validity. But I’m sorry to say the Harlem Globetrotters these days look like baseball compared to what the Savannah Bananas put on the field. You know the old saying about going to the ballpark and seeing something you’ve never seen before? Saturday night I saw about fifty.

I should say that in general Banana Ball does resemble traditional baseball. There’s a pitcher and a batter and fielders and all; the pitcher and fielders try to get the batter out and into the field so they get a turn at bat. That part’s the same. The official rules of Banana Ball, eleven of which are announced at the beginning of the game, are little tweaks that, admittedly, do make the game more interesting, or at least more fan friendly. Common fan friendly. More on how the aficionado reacts in a moment. Number one on the list is the “every inning counts” approach. Similar to match play in golf, you win the inning you get a point. Points are what counts in determining the winner. This tends to keep the game from getting out of hand. Rule number two? Two-hour time limit. That keeps the time from getting out of hand. As someone traveling to baseball games with a young child for a decade I can say that we have seen the final out of very few games. Saturday night? We and 45,000 other fans were there until the final pitch. No one left early. And my electronics-addicted child? Never asked for the iPad once. To give you an idea of how much he cared about seeing the action on the field, at one point we were literally running from the men’s room back to our seats so we wouldn’t miss another second.

On the subject of missing things, the trouble with Banana Ball is that you will. There are sometimes three or four things going on simultaneously, and you’re not sure whether you should be watching the pitcher and batter, the dancing first base coach, the brass band, the guy throwing Mardi Gras beads into the crowd, or dugout-top performance of the Man-nanas.

Man-nanas? Glad you asked.

Similar to pretty much everything the Bananas do, they’ve taken convention and placed it on its head. Instead of hot 20-year-old female cheerleaders, why not have a bunch of sweaty, out-of-shape 50-year-old guys be your cheerleaders? Have them really ham it up, remove some of their clothing, and have the crowd go nuts at every weak attempt at actual rhythm. Absolutely brilliant.

(Not in attendance Saturday night but at times part of the show are the Banana Nanas, and yes, that’s exactly what you think it is.)

And speaking of dance moves, the music is a constant at these things, and it’s always at a 10. The soundtrack is basically a playlist of the 200 most catchy pop hooks of all time, played in eight-second increments on a continuous loop. There are no ballads, there’s certainly no organ, there’s not even walk-up music for batters. No need. Same reason there’s apparently no pitch clock: no need. The game zips along. You know why there’s no instant replay on the Jumbotron? Because by the time you’d show the replay they’ve already moved onto the next thing.

And it’s all about getting the fans involved. This isn’t school, or church, or the opera. It’s a party. And Jesse Cole throws a good party. Fondly likened to P.T. Barnum, he does what Barnum would probably do if he had 21st-century tools in his circus. Clad in his signature yellow tuxedo, Cole is at times on the field making announcements and at times in the stands taking selfies. Imagine George Steinbrenner taking selfies with fans. Actually don’t think about that; it might get ugly. And sometimes the fans really have input. It happened only once Saturday night, but when a fan catches a foul ball on the fly it counts as an out. Can you imagine Barry Bonds being called out because some yahoo in Row 74 caught his foul pop?

Actually don’t think about that either. Same reason.

As goes the usual procedure at these gatherings we were treated to a few Baltimore-friendly cameos. Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes (she’s actually from closer to D.C. but Maryland is Maryland) tumbled onto the field like it was 1996, and former Orioles Matt Wieters and Nick Markakis actually pinch hit for the Bananas. (Both of their hits ended up meaningful in the final tally.) You wonder whether they started with Ripken and Palmer and worked their way down, or just said … Wieters. He fits the common man theme we’ve got going on here.

^{Former Orioles Nick Markakis, left, and Matt Wieters got in on the Bananas’ act Saturday night. (Photo from the @thesavbananas Instagram)}

The common man. Or perhaps the common fan. This was fanfare for the common fan. My son said it best: “This is my kind of baseball.”

Was I actually witnessing the death of my favorite sport? I’m a little bit of a purist and this was pure heresy. In many ways TikTok come to life under the pretense of baseball, and in other settings I do consider this sort of the death knell of society.

But when you’re having a party? How could I not love it?

I’ve seen drunken hockey fans at an NHL playoff game not nearly as loud as Banana fans were last week.

I’ve seen thirty thousand hippies screaming and dancing at a Phish festival and they weren’t nearly as into it as the Bananas faithful.

I’ve seen Jerry Seinfeld perform at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas and it wasn’t nearly as funny as certain spots were in Camden Yards.

Maybe it’s time for me to admit defeat.

The best metaphor I could come up with watching the game was that if your entire life experience so far was watching monks in prayer …

… and then you went to Woodstock.

If it’s not the end of baseball itself, MLB will no doubt pick up some Banana Ball features. They already have to an extent. The pitch clock, limits on mound visits … these things move the game along. Letting the players have a little personality out there? That helps too. And just having a couple games a week? There may be a day. Every Bananas game is like the Super Bowl (including about a six-hour pregame show). You can’t have 162 Super Bowls in a season, though I suppose Broadway plays bring a party every night.

But they’re scripted. Unlike comedy acts and movies and plays, with sports you never know how these things will end, and it is that element that makes the whole thing interesting or perhaps a dud.

Last Saturday night?

Hollywood couldn’t have scripted a better ending.

After winning points in the seventh and eighth innings (with the clock running down!), the Bananas somehow found themselves in a position to win the game in the bottom of the ninth. With one out, fan favorite (they’re all fan favorites) Robert Anthony Cruz comes to the plate. After a first pitch way outside, the lefty Cruz extended to reach one a little more in… and deposited it into the seats in front of the famous warehouse in right field for a walk-off home run.

It was. The greatest. Thing. I’d ever seen.

Not the greatest thing I’d ever seen in sports. The greatest thing I’d ever seen.

Because you can’t script a home run.

And you won’t see a Major Leaguer doing backflips all the way from third base to home.

But you will when you’re witnessing the greatest show in sports.