Jesse Cole started by trying to pull a few more people into a ballpark with whoopee cushions and underwear jokes. On April 25-26, the Savannah Bananas will take that same idea — turn baseball into a full-show experience — to Yankee Stadium.
The Bananas have already sold out parks that usually swallow demand, including Fenway Park in Boston and Yankee Stadium. Cole, 42, launched the team in 2016 after taking over from the Savannah Sand Gnats at Savannah’s historic Grayson Stadium, and the climb from a 4,000-capacity home to one of the hottest tickets in sports has been fast enough to surprise even some of the people who first heard the idea.
Cole’s path began years earlier in Gastonia, N.C., when he was 23 and running the Gastonia Grizzlies. He tried to lift attendance with Flatulence Fun Night, handing out whoopee cushions, then staged a Salute to Underwear Night that let anyone wearing underwear on the outside walk in free. The Grizzlies later layered in music, dancing, fireworks and fan stunts such as a Grandma Beauty Pageant and Dunk the GM in the dunk tank. “It was like going to see a circus but then a game of baseball broke out,” Cole said. “What I learned is that if you put the fans first then everything else will take care of itself,” he said.
That approach did not begin from comfort. Cole said that when he started the Bananas in 2016, “We had sold our house, emptied our savings account and we were sleeping on an air bed.” He added, “We were living off $30 a week for our groceries.” The name Savannah Bananas came from a public competition, a choice that puzzled some locals at first, said Joe Martinelli, president and CEO of Visit Savannah. “I’ll never forget the day that they announced the name of the new team,” Martinelli said. “The reaction in the community was... what?”
Martinelli also recalled asking Cole what the team planned to do and hearing a simple answer: “whatever is normal, we will do the opposite.” “And I thought, ‘OK, well, this is going to be interesting.’ ” he said. That instinct to break with the usual has helped the Bananas grow into a bigger draw than many traditional teams, but the appeal is not just novelty. A 2021 report co-authored by Michael Roberto, a professor of management at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., said the team has stripped away pain points that frustrate fans, including ticketing, parking, concessions and the length and pace of the game. “Stop doing what your customers hate,” Roberto said.
The team’s rise has been built on that idea from the start: entertain first, remove friction, and make the night feel unlike a normal game. The test now comes in New York, where the savannah bananas yankee stadium date is another measure of how far Cole’s experiment has traveled from a small ballpark in Georgia to one of baseball’s most famous stages.
