How the Savannah Bananas took over America and became a cultural phenomenon with more fans than Major League Baseball

Jesse Cole emerged behind home plate of Yankee Stadium dressed in a yellow shirt, a yellow bowler hat and one of his nine yellow tuxedos. Half-hidden beneath the hem of his pants? A pair of yellow running shoes.

They come in rather handy as, night after night, Cole attempts to keep pace with the travelling circus he created. It recently spent months careering around America and shows no sign of slowing down.

Ten years ago, Cole and his wife Emily arrived in Savannah to start a new summer baseball team. Within months, they had reported debts of $1million. The couple sold their house, emptied their savings accounts and and slept on an airbed – just to keep the team afloat.

A decade later, the Savannah Bananas are a nationwide phenomenon. They just finished a record-breaking tour that, over nine months, carried them between 40 cities across 25 states. They took over college football stadiums, NFL stadiums and 17 major league ballparks including two nights at Yankee Stadium in September.

Around 2.2million fans came for a taste of Banana Ball, Cole’s mutation of America’s Pastime that was created in 2018 and has been christened ‘The Greatest Show in Sports.’

It’s half baseball, half carnival. Nine innings of pitches and strikes and singing and dancing and acrobatics and blindfolded pillow fights. All packed into a couple of hours. They have been branded baseball’s answer to the Harlem Globetrotters. Cole would rather be compared to Saturday Night Live. Every Banana Ball show is different, he points out.

‘To be a dreamer, a visionary, you have to say: “What if?”’ Cole told the Daily Mail. ‘And that “what if” gets me excited… now, a lot of those crazy dreams are coming true.’

Cole created Banana Ball and founded Fans First Entertainment, which owns its six teams: the Bananas, Firefighters, Party Animals, Texas Tailgaters, Loco Beach Coconuts and Indianapolis Clowns.

His extraordinary journey began in 2008, when – at just 23 – Cole took over as general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies. A summer team in North Carolina, they attracted only a few hundred fans until their GM began studying Walt Disney and new ways to build their crowds.

Among his early innovations? A grandma beauty pageant and races between toddlers and turtles. He eventually bought the Grizzlies in 2014 before heading to Savannah to peel open a new world.

The Bananas competed in college summer leagues until 2022, when they broke away to play Banana Ball full-time. They had first set out on the road a year earlier with a trip to Mobile, Alabama. Then came a seven-city tour. Then came bigger dreams and bigger stages.

‘What if we sold out Fenway Park? What if we end up going to Yankee Stadium?’ Cole thought. This year, they did both. The Daily Mail was there to see the Savannah Bananas face their rivals, the Firefighters, on the first of two nights.

Every single Banana Ball game has sold out but this was perhaps the most striking illustration of how far the circus has traveled. 

‘A surreal moment,’ Firefighters star Johnny Hummel told the Daily Mail. And yet? ‘We’re just getting started,’ Cole said. ‘Banana Ball is in the first inning.’

He wasn’t lying. In October, Cole revealed the blueprint for the inaugural season of the Banana Ball Championship League: six teams will play in front of 3.2m fans in 45 states.

Their 2026 tour will begin in Florida in February and include 14 MLB arenas and 10 football stadiums. Among them? Texas A&M’s Kyle Field, capacity 102,000. Cole also unveiled two new teams: the Coconuts and the Clowns. He has plenty of other ideas left up those yellow sleeves.

‘How can we bring our game play somewhere that people haven’t imagined before?’ he said. ‘From playing on a beach, to an aircraft carrier, to playing in Central Park.’ Some of his players fancy taking Banana Ball to Japan and to Premier League stadiums in the UK. The appetite is there, it would appear.

The Bananas boast 15m followers across TikTok and Instagram. The Yankees – one of sport’s most iconic franchises – have fewer than 6m.

Earlier this year, the waitlist for Banana Ball tickets reached 3.5m people. The crowd at Yankee Stadium was full of young families and included one kid named Hank, 12, who told the Daily Mail he dreams of playing Banana Ball rather than in Major League Baseball. It’s the ‘energy’ of nights like these, he said.

Others enjoy the speed – games are done in two hours – and some of Banana Ball’s tweaks to traditional baseball. Among them? Bunting is banned. And if a foul ball is caught in the crowd, the batter is out. ‘It’s just brought a new generation to baseball,’ one Yankees supporter said. 

But the true secret of Banana Ball? ‘We break down the barrier between fan and player,’ Bananas star Jackson Olson told the Daily Mail at a Raising Cane’s event. 

‘When you go to a Major League Baseball game, you’re usually lucky if you get one autograph, maybe a ball tossed up to you.’ Here, he points out, it’s all an all-day ‘party.’

Alas, Banana Ball is not to everyone’s taste. Perhaps that is inevitable when you challenge an American institution. And when even the umpires break into carefully-choreographed dance routines.

Cole prefers to call MLB a ‘partner’ rather than a rival. He believes they have the same mission – ‘to create fans’ – and more teams will open their doors to Banana Ball on their upcoming tour.

‘When you zoom out on companies that have really made a difference, they’re 50-70, 100 years [old]. We’ve been playing Banana Ball for just three or four years,’ Cole said.

‘That’s what excites me and excites our team, because there’s so much more we can accomplish.’

Bill LeRoy was a sophomore in college when, in the summer of 2018, he agreed a three-day contract with the Savannah Bananas.

‘Day one, we [made] a music video to “Old Town Road” [by Lil Nas X],’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘Our coach was on a horse, and we were dancing… we practiced baseball, of course, but we also danced, we sang. We were bouncing around the town in our bright yellow uniforms.’

LeRoy thought to himself: ‘I’m only gonna be here for three days. I might as well have fun and let loose.’

Nearly eight years on, he is a social media sensation and one of Banana Ball’s biggest stars. ‘They fell in love with me, I fell in love with them and I just never left,’ he said.

The team had to survive some early teething problems. Their first shipment of t-shirts misspelled ‘Bananas’; their first ever trial game was rained out; their first ticket launch caused the system to shut down.

Opening night at Yankee Stadium passed without any obvious hitch but only after hours of rehearsals: everything – from handshakes to public announcements – was practiced over and over again.

The finished product, orchestrated by an emcee known as the ‘Chief Potassium Enthusiast,’ is extraordinary. In the Bronx, two fans battled to catch bananas – launched from the stands – inside their pants; the crowd were whipped up by a ‘Dad Bod Cheerleading Squad.’ They are as described and they held mid-game auditions for fathers in the crowd.

WWE star Damian Priest threw the ceremonial first pitch using a golden banana. But only after putting on a blindfold and crawling around the infield to find it.

Three dads were put through Broadway auditions and boy band ‘Big Time Rush’ appeared for an impromptu performance. Their backing dancers? Players from the Bananas and Firefighters.

Other special guests included actor Keegan-Michael Key and Yankees legend Joe Torre. The Hall of Famer was brought out to be first-base ‘coach’. The 85-year-old even performed a little jig and, every now and then, a game resembling baseball broke out.

One player pitched from up on stilts, others performed backflips and behind-the-back catches. In Banana Ball, teams win a point for every inning they win – rather than every run they score – and tied games are settled by ‘showdown tie breakers’ which begin with one hitter taking on one pitcher, one catcher and one fielder. 

On opening night in the Bronx, the Bananas triumphed in overtime. Virtually no one left early and, shortly before the end, the floodlights switched off, phone lights turned on and everyone joined in a chorus of Coldplay’s hit ‘Yellow’. 

For all the pantomime fun, however, the evening was laced with poignancy. Just days after the 24th anniversary of 9/11, the Firefighters put together a touching tribute to first responders who served at Ground Zero.

Then there was the young boy who had survived two heart surgeries. He was invited up to the plate to have a hit and Yankee Stadium rose as one as he made his way round the bases.

This place won’t have seen many more life-affirming home runs and, later that night, Key helped raise funds for Bananas Foster, the team’s nonprofit aimed at celebrating the foster care community.

Jesse and Emily Cole became foster parents in 2020 but all of these gestures underscore the primary mission of Banana Ball. ‘To bring joy and bring fun,’ the founder said.

Their visit to the Bronx came just days after political activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated and, during an-all staff meeting in the stands of Yankee Stadium, players were told: ‘This world is heavy… the world needs this more than ever.’

Over two sold-out nights in New York, 98,000 fans agreed. In time, insiders expect more and more players to choose Banana Ball over the grind of reaching the major leagues. It seems this traveling circus is only headed in one direction.