SAVANNAH, Ga. — The slogan for the Savannah Bananas is simple: ‘We Make Baseball Fun.’ And that may be an understatement for arguably the hottest team in all of sports right now.
They’re wild, wacky and wicked fun. They’ve been called the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. “We travel with 120, where they travel with 30. The pep band, the breakdancing coaches and everybody and the games are not rigged. We play our own games, Banana Ball, which is a 2 hour timed game. Fans catch a foul ball, it’s an out. Batters can steal first, so it’s a lot different in that sense,” said Jesse Cole, the team’s owner.
The baseball is bananas and can be more like a circus. The Savannah Bananas are a collegiate summer league team. They’re a huge hit wherever they play, thanks to their out of this world stunts, like a pitcher on stilts, a 3rd base coach giving signs using air traffic control wands and a batter hitting with his bat on fire. Jesse, who is 38 years old, is the brains behind the Bananas. He is a former star pitcher for Scituate High School, where he graduated in 2002.
Jesse now sports his signature yellow tuxedo and has become a promotional genius.
“To think 6 years ago my wife and I were sleeping on air bed and struggled selling tickets to now having sold out every single game with a wait list of over 40-thousand for tickets, we never imagined it and 2.5 million Tik Tok followers with all a young audience. It’s mind blowing to all of us,” he said.
Jesse said he plans to bring the Savannah Bananas on tour to New England next summer and play at Double-A and Triple-A ballparks.
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