The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Savannah Bananas look to an appealing future
Barnstorming team — and viral social media sensation — has disrupted baseball and built an impressive bunch of followers.
To Catfish Staggs, the Savannah Bananas logo tattooed on his right bicep is a yellow badge of courage. He commissioned the ink in early 2016 at the request of a then-Savannah newcomer, Bananas owner Jesse Cole. The fledgling baseball executive had spotted a tattoo for another Savannah team on Staggs’ body and asked what it would take for him to add the menacing, bat-wielding banana logo.
“Lifetime tickets was the first offer,” Staggs said, recalling the interaction. “They hadn’t played a game yet. They were a college summer league team. People thought they were hokey, with the name and all the antics. The general consensus was the team wouldn’t make it.
“You don’t tattoo the name of a one-night stand on your body. That took courage.”
Cole and Staggs eventually reached a compromise. In exchange for becoming a human billboard, the Savannah fan received season tickets for the 2016 and 2017 seasons; permission to bring his cat, Zander Van Staggs, to games at Savannah’s Grayson Stadium; and the honor of throwing out a first pitch.
Eight seasons later, Bananas’ tats decorate many a person’s body parts. The “hokey” team went from struggling startup to hometown curiosity to national phenomenon, generating comparisons to the Harlem Globetrotters. With a run of sellouts that spans seven seasons and a social media following that numbers in the eight figures, the branding that Staggs still likes to flex is familiar the world over.
Mention of the Bananas brings visions of pitchers on stilts, hitters wielding flaming bats, middle-aged men in tight T-shirts leading cheers and break dancing base coaches. Then there’s Cole, the omnipresent frontman who stalks stadium grandstands in a yellow tuxedo with matching bowler hat.
On Thursday, Cole announced the 2024 Banana Ball World Tour, an 84-game, 29-city circuit that aims to draw more than a million fans. The schedule spans nine months, includes games in six major league ballparks, and ends with a celebratory Bahamas cruise for fans he calls “bananiacs.”
Cole no longer has to trade tickets for tattoos. But the Bananas are far from ripe.
“We’re still in the first inning; like we are 1,000% still in the first inning. We’re just getting started,” Cole said. “We’ve had a heck of a first inning. But there’s a lot more game to play.”
From novelty act to showstopper
The Bananas’ “first inning” is a saga seldom seen in baseball and sports in general.
Cole and his wife, Emily, moved to Savannah from Gastonia, North Carolina, in 2015 and founded the Bananas in a nearly century-old ballpark abandoned earlier that year by a minor-league franchise. Grayson Stadium’s previous tenants, the Savannah Sand Gnats, had left nothing behind; staffers even ripped the telephone lines from the office’s walls on the way out.
The Coles nearly went bust making Grayson playable for the first season. Jesse Cole often shares recollections of the couple’s first apartment in Savannah, a cockroach-infested rental where they slept on a mattress on the floor. They limited themselves to a $30-a-week grocery allowance yet still fell a million dollars into debt.
At the ballpark, the Bananas received a lukewarm welcome. Savannahians are notoriously fickle sports fans, and as Staggs said, many groused about trading a professional team that fielded a handful of major league prospects for a squad of all-stars from mid-major college baseball programs.
Yet unlike the Sand Gnats, the Bananas drew fans. The Gnats averaged fewer than 2,000 fans in 4,500-seat Grayson Stadium in their final season; the Bananas packed the house the following
year. They sold out 17 of 25 games, through family-friendly promotions and kitschy marketing.
“The tickets used to be $7 with all-you-can eat food — they were doing everything they could to get people in there,” Staggs said. “Now there’s 10,000 people on the waiting list.”
The sellouts kept coming, and Cole and his staff kept innovating. A pep rally and a parade, not batting practice, highlighted Bananas’ pregame activities. Paying homage to a baby in a banana costume — “Lion King” style — preceded each game’s first pitch. Between-innings entertainment went beyond trivia quizzes and dizzy bat races.
By the 2018 season, the Bananas were appointment entertainment in Savannah. The Coles had found better living quarters and started a family. The team’s front office pros were focused on using social media video to grow the brand.
And Jesse Cole was devising an alternative format for baseball, one that would meld zany antics with the play itself. Known as Banana Ball, games are played under unorthodox rules that shorten game times to two hours.
In Banana Ball, if a fan catches a foul ball, the hitter is out. In Banana Ball, a walk can go for
extra bases, as every infielder must touch the ball before the play is over. In Banana Ball, games are scored by innings won, not runs scored.
Cole tested Banana Ball in a pair of closed scrimmages against a college team later that year. The next spring, the Bananas assembled a semi-pro “Premier Team” to play Banana Ball exhibitions before and after the college Bananas’ season.
The Premier Team became a barnstorming team in 2021 and played in eight cities in 2021 and 2022. The Bananas grew into a novelty, even starring in their own ESPN docu-series titled “Bananaland.” The success led to the Coles folding the college Bananas following the 2022 season in order to concentrate on the traveling team.
In 2023, the Bananas visited minor league and spring training ballparks in 33 cities in 20 states and drew more than 500,000 fans to the stadiums and 7 million viewers to a YouTube channel. The Baseball Hall of Fame installed a Bananas’ exhibit.
“I spent my life in a ballpark. I’ve never had a better time at a ballpark than when I’m with the Savannah Bananas,” said Jake Peavy, a Cy Young winner with the San Diego Padres who makes
frequent Bananas cameos.
Count Savannah resident Heath Moyer among the ardent Banana fans who marvel at the team’s success and Cole’s ability to make all the right moves.
“And he’s still evolving; he adds new things all the time,” Moyer said. “There are naysayers, so-called baseball purists, but whatever. You have to take it at face value. If you don’t want to see the shenanigans, then don’t go. There are plenty of others who want your tickets.”
A vision without boundaries
Cole likens his vision for the Bananas to Walt Disney’s on Disneyland — as a “living, breathing thing that will never be done.”
He counts the successful 2023 season as a seven-month tutorial on how to perfect the fan experience and adapt it to different ballparks, especially larger venues. The Bananas will play in three 40,000-plus-seat stadiums in 2024 — up from sub-15,000seat ballparks previously — and Cole is as confident in his ability to scale up the fun as he is in filling all the seats.
“We wouldn’t go somewhere if we didn’t think we could sell
it out,” Cole said.
The Banana brand is far-reaching now, Cole said. The Bananas and their sister team, the Party Animals, have a combined 15 million followers on TikTok. Bananas merchandise orders come from all over the world. A second season of the “Bananaland” docu-series debuted Thursday night on YouTube and already boasts 20,000 views.
The 2024 season will help Cole gauge the “next level” of potential for the Bananas. He’s hesitant to grow too fast, understanding that stretching too thin could negatively affect the quality of the fan experience. His greatest thrill is when fans tell him “Thank you for coming to our city” before he can thank them for supporting the Bananas.
“It’s staggering to think about the amount of people who are following us and looking to be entertained for us,” Cole said.
Those fans aren’t just in America. The Bananas call their baseball circus a “World Tour” for a reason, and Cole says one of the team’s future innings will involve globetrotting.
“The desire for us to go internationally is huge,” he said. “Yes, it will be a world tour. Stay tuned. We’ll get there.”