Very OT: Anyone watching the Savannah Bananas?
Anyone else following the Savannah Bananas?
I've been following them because they take my favorite sport, which has become slow, bloated with more ads than actual sport, and borderline un-watchable over the past few years, and brings it back to what it could be, which is a fun enjoyable time at the ballpark.
Trying to get tickets to their games is borderline impossible, and I think the minor leagues and MLB are going to have to start taking some marketing tips from them if they want to resonate with fans again.
Here's a quick intro for anyone who is not aware of what this team is:
I saw some of this randomly at a bar about a year ago and everyone I was with thought I lived under a rock because I'd never heard of them. Pretty entertaining in a Harlem Globetrotters sort of way.
i’ve see their hijinks on the Twitter for a few years now. whoever handles their promotions/social media has done a phenomenal job of making them a national sensation.
The play where the outfielder drops his glove and catches the ball bare handed while doing a backflip is incredible!
Here's a play that even a baseball instructor had to admire
Incredible
That’s ridiculous.
Is there a Kentucky joke in there somewhere?
I was shopping at a Scheel's yesterday and their jerseys were in the most front facing display of the entire basbeall section. The guy who bought them (the team...not the jerseys) for almost nothing and turned them into this needs a movie about them now! (consider this my notification of copyright)
If you follow it closely I will hide my Savannah Banana.
One banana
Two banana
Three banana
Four
I attended a game last year and it was excellent. We tried to get tickets again this year and couldn't get them (a whole year in advance). There was something for everyone - one of the Backstreet Boys was a guest player so the team sang and danced every chance they got (which my wife loved) . The game was against a compilation of former major leaguers which was cool to see even if none of the players were super stars (though former Tiger Curtis Granderson was the visiting team manager). There was a little kid play area (with bounce houses) for my 4 year-old daughter when she got bored of the baseball. All in all a very worthwhile experience if you can swing it.
Cheapest tickets on the secondary market when they came to Indy last year were over $300 each...
Right now, there's nothing below $500. Even when they play the bigger stadiums.
Got to see them when I was in Savannah a couple summers ago, before they completely exploded in popularity. They’re really fun, I recommend going if you can get tickets. I could not get tickets for their trip here to Boston, unfortunately.
I've been to a game when they went on tour.
Very fun and very wild baseball experience.
Would recommend
Been seeing the occasional vid for a couple years now. All kinds of fun. Cracks me up when they're in the field, batter is waiting....waiting.... for them to finish the schtick and pitch the ball... and then swing and a miss!! LOL.
One of the Banana players got hit by a pitch and “dropped dead”. Two player came out, put sunglasses on him, and walk/dragged hit to first ala Weekend at Bernies.
Count me as someone who understands the attraction but doesn't like them. Because of my kids, who played throughout high school and one in college, and my husband who is a huge baseball fan, I've developed a love of baseball. I like it more than football now. Incidentally, one of my son's college teammates played for them the summer after his junior year. I think it was on their collegiate team, which may not exist anymore. That was straight baseball. No stilts, no song and dance. I think of the Bananas as spectacle, not sport, even though all the players are good.
Nailed it. It's entertainment, not sport. Which is great. There is a place for both.
I grew up with a similar experience.
Baseball was religion, and used to watch with my grandfather and my dad, and trips to out of town stadiums and semi-regular trips to cooperstown are some of my life highlights.
But most of my beef is with the pro game. There's a commissioner who is not a fan of the sport itself, but rather seems himself as a businessman (sound familiar), while the teams themselves only see the game as filler between sponsorships. Now there's ads on jerseys, in a sport where everyone is already making record money.
It's near impossible to sell the modern major league experience to the next generation of kids. Believe me, I've tried with my partner, and niece/nephew. It also doesn't help when my home team would literally rather have empty seats to protect "premium" seat prices, than to let them drop, and have a family be able to afford to go.
I love this sport, but it's been overtaken by the private equity mentality of "how can we make money today", and it does not care at all about whether the sport will have fans in 10/20/30 years. For a long time, boxing was one of the most popular sports in America, and then they decided to put their sport behind a pay-per-view paywall, and now look at it.
If the Bananas can use the entertainment side of the game to lure in future fans, I'm all for it.
I agree, it is hard to sell it to younger people and I think that's more the result of attention span as it relates to entertainment. They've grown up with instant gratification by way of screens/video games. Baseball requires patience from the fan. The action ebbs and flows, and sometimes there isn't much action at all. And from afar, it doesn't seem to require a ton of skill (and then you play the game and realize that catching a tiny ball while running full speed forward while looking backwards is way harder than it looks, and hitting a 98 mph fastball even for the best players is close to impossible). I really enjoyed the college game. The skill level isn't anywhere near even minor leaguers but I think that and the mistakes keep it interesting.
I caught the Banana's a couple of years ago on a Facebook Reel and was hooked. I immediately thought someone had taken the Harlem Globe Trotters and converted it to baseball. I have never been to a game, could never get tickets, but I can't imagine anyone going to one of their games and not having a fun time.
I think they're very entertaining and hilarious, it's just not baseball. It's more like Broadway.
I've been following them because they take my favorite sport, which has become slow, bloated with more ads than actual sport, and borderline un-watchable over the past few years…
To me, that description fits college football much more so than baseball. The steps MLB has taken to increase action and pace of play have been very effective IMO, and baseball doesn’t suffer from ad bloat like other sports, since the between inning breaks are natural spots for commercials (which seem reasonable in length). But that’s just like, my opinion, man.
Agreed. Baseball has finally started to address some of their issues with speeding up the game and holding umps to an actual standard.
But the in-stadium product is still lacking in a lot of ways, which is where I think the Bananas are excelling. Going to the stadium still feels like a constant upsell at every corner. But I could say the same thing for things like concerts and festivals.
I grow bananas in my yard here in Florida. I didn't know they grew way up in Savannah. I'll do some more research.
I don’t really follow them but I appreciate the Bananas. They are carrying on a long legacy of barnstorming in baseball, which I think is good for the game.
Michigan had its own barnstormers in the early 20th century in the House of David, who were quite similar in their fun impact on the game.
https://bentley.umich.edu/news-events/magazine/the-bearded-barnstormers-of-benton-harbor/
Just as a business proposition, I hope the "real" sports leagues pay a little more attention to what making the environment fun for fans instead of constant television timeouts and corporate shilling can do for the bottom line.
https://www.si.com/mlb/2024/05/02/summer-league-team-glow-in-dark-game
I saw this, and immediately thought the same thing.
It is not baseball. It is entertainment. It is great for people who aren't at the level of being able to plant their feet on the rubber, in the batter's box, position position themselves in the field based on the numerous little factors that may affect every ball put into play. As someone who has played thousands of games, it isn't something I would attend on my own when I can attend an actual game, but I would attend with friends and family who are looking to be entertained as the Bananas and their crazy rules and antics are worth quite a few laughs.
I'll be down there in a couple weeks and see if I can sneak in.
I mean... that plan didn't work in Ukraine
Yeah, but you haven't seen my banana costume
Yeah, I've been to a game and would love to go to another. Lots of fun, even more so than your typical minor league team.
And I am a proud owner of a Savannah Bananas hat, which I wear quite often.
The story behind their shift to a entertainment team vs. a baseball team is fascinating. The owners were down to their last dollars and were facing the inability to make payroll. They pivoted to save themselves and their employees and it paid off big time.
The Savannah Bananas approach is a gimmick not the solution to baseball's decline in popularity. But minor league sports have always been great places for gimmicks because quite frankly it's more the carnival in town than serious sport at a certain point.
It's not impossible to make young people like baseball in general, but it's impossible in many cases. But it's been that way for 70 years. Baseball was once the undisputed number one sport in America. Football and basketball were nowhere near it in terms of national prominence. But baseball wasn't full of stunts or anything and fundamentally not much different from today. Baseball hasn't changed nearly as much as society has. It's worth remembering that back then everything was slower. Music was slower, movies were slower, the news were slower, interactions on talk shows were slower, life overall was slower. So baseball not being an especially fast-paced or action-packed sport didn't stand out that much.
Back then people were also more used to things of importance being distant and rarely observed as they happened. You didn't see your favorite actor every day, you didn't hear your favorite song on the radio every day, you wouldn't see or hear about the president every day. The same applied to sports stars. Most Americans didn't see Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams all the time either. And most people did not know much about them other than what the papers told them. Those names lived in people's heads more than anything. As time has passed, people have increasingly come to expect intimacy from their idols and people have become hungrier all the time for a near constant flow of images and information about the things and people they care about.
In baseball, the biggest star of the game will be quasi anonymous in a pretty decent number of games each season. Even in their best games, people will only really see them in a handful of short moments. In a two and a half hour broadcast. Someone I know specifically flew out to a game this year to watch Shohei Ohtani play. Ohtani went hitless in the game. In contrast, barring injury, an NFL superstar QB like a Mahomes or a basketball superstar like Lebron will basically be guaranteed to do a ton of attention-worthy stuff even if it's not their best game.
But those 'defects' aren't anything MLB or its marketing team can fix. They're intrinsic to the concepts of the game. They can't change the rules to give Ohtani a dozen at-bats and make it so the best hitters hit .500+ without altering the sport in a way to make it essentially a totally new sport that has nothing to do with the old one. It would also cause baseball to lose its biggest brand strength - its connection to the past. Baseball still has millions of fans and people still go to the ball game in every city, in spite of its death having been predicted for decades now. And I think a big part of that is its fundamental quaintness and simplicity. The fact it still resembles something that your dad and his dad and his dad experienced. That does not appeal to 14-22 year old kids as a rule, but does appeal to 40-50 year olds. And remember people today in their 40s were kids during the NBA's big 90s boom and all the complaints about baseball being boring and slow in comparison were already well-publicized back then. So maybe baseball's fate is that it's never again going to be junior's favorite sport but will always have a place in dad's heart.
And as much as people complain that it's slow, because of that, it doesn't require constant attention. It's a great sport for people who want to have a social evening out. You can go to a game with friends and talk, drink, and socialize and only sort of pay attention without missing the biggest moments. In that way, it really is a pastime -- an enjoyable way to pass the time in a social environment with a game as the background noise (if that's what you choose). When I go to games, I sit as close as I can to the field. I like to feel the energy of the players. I especially like to watch the pitcher. It's a contemplative game, much of it is confidence. I think it's funny (funny odd) that players who are as skilled as big leaguers can lose their confidence. That is the most intriguing part of baseball to me. These guys are so good, but you lose the feel during one game, a particular pitch isn't working, and it can spiral downwards. I mean, how is that possible when you've been doing something so well for so long?
Savannah Banana Fofana?
“which has become slow, bloated with more ads than actual sport, and borderline un-watchable over the past few years”
I don’t get this. Over the last two seasons, with the changes they’ve made, this hasn’t been my experience at all.
I remember watching the banana splits on Saturday morning when I was 6 back in 1969
Good old Danger Island, the Three Musketeers and Arabian Knights.
I remember watching the banana splits on Saturday morning when I was 6 back in 1969
I got tickets to see them play and the tickets were like 70 dollars to sit in the club section which is just the 200 level of Nationals park. They also had a lottery for regular non-season ticket holders but a lot of people didn't win.
I'm curious about the novelty.