A Fun Reboot For America’s Pastime:

How the Savannah Bananas Are Changing Baseball

Special guest appearance by the OG Banana Baller…

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Baseball is boring. 

That’s not true, but you really have to understand the game and all its strategies and nuanced rules to be excited by it.

It takes dedication to a real fan.

In 2024, Major League Baseball instituted new rules meant to speed up the game.

• When there are runners on base, the pitcher has 18 seconds to throw the ball.

• Mound visits — when a catcher goes out to the pitcher’s mound to discuss strategy — can really slow down a game.

My mother joked that the catcher and pitcher were just discussing where to have dinner that night.

These and other changes have made games shorter and less boring, but baseball is still long periods of nothing interrupted by 10 seconds of frenzy.  It isn’t as consistently exciting as football, basketball, or hockey. 

When Gallup began asking “What is your favorite spectator sport?” in 1937, 34% of Americans named baseball and 23% named football.

Baseball has been in second place ever since.

Currently, 41% of U.S. adults name football as their top sport and only 10% choose baseball.

Basketball is a close third with 9%. It may overtake baseball the next time that Gallup takes the survey.

Part of the shift is television.

Football games last a certain length of time with scheduled breaks, which makes it easy for TV networks to program commercials.

In baseball, there are nine innings but each half inning can last three batters or four or seventeen. We just don’t know. Will the game last two hours or three?  Three and a half? Four?

And baseball teams play nearly every day through the season. Football games are only once a week, so networks made some games into events, like Monday Night Football or, the granddaddy of them all:

The World Series, on the other hand, might go four games, or five or six or seven. Again, we just don’t know. Baseball is from a time before television.

Postwar America — with the rise of suburbia far from the downtown ballparks, the proliferation of TV sets…

…and the popularity of communal entertainment rituals — suited football’s spectacle and violence.

NFL Films’ slow‑motion replays, dramatic music, and portraying football as “battlefield poetry” resonated with Cold‑War era sensibilities and a growing appetite for vicarious heroism.

In comparison, baseball is slow and old-timey.

To truly enjoy the game, you need to know the percentage of times Batter A has gotten on base against Pitcher B in Stadium C when the wind comes from the northwest, but who has time to memorize all those stats?

Besides, a lot of people don’t like all the spitting.

America’s Pastime is past its time. Jesse Cole wanted to do something about that.

That ended any chance of a career as a player, so in 2007, he accepted an assistant‐coaching role in the Cape Cod Baseball League with the Cotuit Kettleers. Sitting in the dugout during a game, he realized: “I was bored out of my mind.”

Even here, in his own team’s game playing the sport he wanted to play all his life, baseball bored him.

It reminded him of every critique he’d heard from fans:

• “Too slow.”
• “Too much downtime.”

Within weeks, he pivoted into front office work, taking the general‐manager job with the Gastonia Grizzlies, a collegiate summer league team in North Carolina. He was just 23. The team had only $268 in the bank with losses mounting. 

That’s when he found his calling wasn’t in pitching, but in completely reimagining the fans’ experience.

He experimented with on‑field entertainment, like getting the teams and audiences to do silly dances between innings.

The stunts worked.

Attendance climbed, the Grizzlies won championships, and Cole learned that making baseball fun could improve the fans’ enjoyment, the team’s morale, and the bottom line.

The Director of Fun he hired? She was named Emily and they fell in love.

Which is good, because he had already paid for the fireworks.

The next day, they celebrated with a trip to Savannah.

They went to a minor league game there. They loved the field and grandstand, but the seats were nearly empty. They asked around and someone said an average of 200 tickets were sold per game.

It’s a 4,000 seat ballpark.

A year or two later, the team left Savannah due to lack of interest.

It wasn’t the minor leagues, it was the collegiate summer league.

When they closed on the sale and were handed the keys, they discovered the previous owners removed everything: desks, chairs, appliances. They had even turned off the water and electricity. It was going to take a lot to rebuild.

They sold their house and slept on an air mattress in a shed on the grounds. That’s how much they believed they could do in Savannah what they had done in Gastonia.

Savannans weren’t so sure, especially after the team name was announced. The Coles held a contest to name the team, and the winning entry was the “Savannah Bananas.”

In fact, quite the opposite.

With the dance routines and fan games between innings, the Bananas went from selling one season ticket in the first three months to filling the stadium in most of their home games. They won the League championship. That’s unheard of for a first year franchise.

Jesse wanted to figure out why, so he filmed the fans to see when they got restless or tired.

He and his leadership team laid out every “boring” element of baseball, and resolved to do the exact opposite.

Thus was born the first draft of Banana Ball: a fan‑first set of rules designed to turn every inning into a highlight and every spectator into a participant.

The new rules state:

• Games don’t last more than two hours
• Bunting is illegal
• And batters can’t leave the batters box. 

If four balls are thrown, the batter doesn’t walk to first base. He runs:

Only after all seven fielders have had the ball can they attempt to tag the runner out.

This sort of madness reminds some of the Harlem Globetrotters, but their games were scripted.

Banana ball is a real game – with honest results.

The winner is the better team playing under rules designed to entertain the crowd. It’s becoming more popular every year, with games selling out Major League stadiums like Fenway Park.

Instead of the Globetrotters, a better comparison is with Kevin Connors.

He was 6’5” and his sense of humor was almost as big. He’s one of the few people to play both professional baseball and basketball.

In 1945, he joined the Rochester Royals, who are now called the Sacramento Kings.

In 1948, he went to spring training with the Brooklyn Dodgers but didn’t make the team. He played with the Dodgers’ minor league team in Montreal, and joined the Chicago Cubs in 1951.

He played first base and became known for yelling to his teammates, “Chuck it to me!” People stopped calling him Kevin, calling him Chuck instead. He never liked “Kevin” anyway.

Though he made it to the majors, he knew his professional career was coming to an end and instead set his sights on Hollywood. Tall and handsome, with decent acting chops, he decided to make himself known. Besides, he believed that baseball should be entertaining.

After hitting home runs, batters traditionally run around the diamond. You’ve got to “touch ‘em all,” meaning step on each of the four bases.

Connors thought he might spice things up a bit so when he hit a home run in 1952, he trotted like usual to first base, but then he slid into second.

Urban legends say he told the umpire, “There’s nothing in the rulebook that says you have to run.” He never actually said that, but he later admitted that part of his motivation was to prove there were no written rules against such antics — only unwritten expectations of propriety. 

Some in the audience loved it. Others hated it, but it was the talk of the town. By turning his routine home run jog into an impromptu circus act, he both entertained the home crowd and caught the eye of Hollywood scouts. He was in Los Angeles, after all, and word got around.

It was a small but memorable role as a police captain. He was paid $500 for a few hours’ work and quipped that acting got him into the “big leagues” faster than baseball did.

More movie roles came in. He was in South Sea Woman, Trouble Along The Way, and Old Yeller. Then in 1958, he got his best known character:

When we think of Chuck Connors, that’s the role that comes to mind.

And all because he made a few minutes of baseball fun.

He would have been right at home on the Savannah Bananas.

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