When he was 23, Jesse Cole was general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies baseball team in Gastonia, NC — and it was going badly.
With only a couple hundred people watching the games and money fast running out, he decided to try something different to boost attendances, handing out whoopee cushions at Flatulence Fun Night and hosting a Salute to Underwear Night, where anyone wearing their underwear on the outside of their clothes gained free entry.
Soon he added music, dancing and fireworks and went big on interactive fan experiences, like a Grandma Beauty Pageant and Dunk the GM in the Dunk Tank, and, sure enough, attendances went through the roof.
“It was like going to see a circus but then a game of baseball broke out,” he tells The Post.
Unwittingly, though, the Grizzlies would prove to be the blueprint for his next, and most famous, creation — the Savannah Bananas. “What I learned is that if you put the fans first then everything else will take care of itself,” he adds.
Today, the Savannah Bananas are one of the biggest draws in American sports, selling out stadiums including Major League Baseball venues like Fenway Park in Boston and Yankee Stadium, where they’re playing April 25-26.
Cole, 42, launched the college summer team in 2016, taking over from the Savannah Sand Gnats at the city’s historic 4,000 capacity Grayson Stadium and setting about doing “something different or impossible,” he says.
“We had sold our house, emptied our savings account and we were sleeping on an air bed. We were living off $30 a week for our groceries. Something had to change,” he recalls.
The first thing was the team name and after a public competition to choose one, the “Savannah Bananas” were born.
“I’ll never forget the day that they announced the name of the new team,” recalls Joe Martinelli, President and CEO of Visit Savannah.
“The reaction in the community was . . . what?”
That said, when Martinelli first met Jesse Cole he was struck by his vision for the fledgling team. “I said ‘Tell me what you’re going to do’. And he said, well, whatever is normal, we will do the opposite.
And I thought, ‘OK, well, this is going to be interesting.’ ”
A decade later, and Cole is now heading up an organization with a value reportedly running into hundreds of millions of dollars, with the Savannah Bananas popularity stretching right across the country and even internationally.
Marketing expert Michael Roberto is Professor of Management Bryant University in Smithfield, RI, and co-author of the 2021 report “Savannah Bananas: Growing the Greatest Show in Baseball.” He says that unlike MLB teams, the Bananas have put the fan experience front and center.
“The Bananas have identified and alleviated so many of the pain points that customers experienced at a typical ballgame, like ticketing, parking, concessions and so on, as well as addressing the length and pace of the game,” he explains.
“It’s like what Jesse Cole says: Stop doing what your customers hate.”
Of course, baseball has a long and checkered history of new and novel marketing stunts.
Famously, Bill Veeck, owner of the St. Louis Browns, and another of Cole’s inspirations, hired Eddie Gaedel, a 3’7” little person, to pinch-hit in 1951 and, later, introduced disco-themed nights and exploding scoreboards when he owned the Chicago White Sox.
In 1974, the Cleveland Indians staged Ten Cent Beer Night, a promotion that ended in a ninth-inning riot among inebriated fans.
There’s more than a hint of Veeck in Cole’s approach, not to mention the greatest showman of them all, PT Barnum.
With team dance routines, blaring music and an emphasis on entertainment, Bananas games are an assault on the senses.
They even have a moonwalking umpire and one player, Dakota “Stilts” Albritton, who bats and pitches wearing stilts making him 10-feet 9-inches tall.
“It’s about creating an experience people can’t get anywhere else,” adds Cole.
Designed to be faster and more accessible, each “Banana Ball” game has a strict two-hour time limit while a host of tweaks to other rules means the pace of play is not just quicker but more appealing to fans too.
If someone in the stands catches a foul ball, for example, meanwhile, the batter is out.
Bananas superfan Marty Jones says Banana Ball has changed the way he watches baseball.
“I’m a big Atlanta Braves fan too but I’m telling you, if I’m at a game and the Braves are winning 8-0 in the 5th, I’m probably leaving,” he says. “You don’t get that with Banana Ball. You can score seven runs in one inning but guess what? They only count for one run.
“And that’s down to Jesse. He wants people to stay throughout.”
Yet Banana Ball has exposed a tension between their super-popular version of the game versus the traditions of Major League Baseball and whether it’s prepared to adapt to accommodate new generations of fans.
The fact that MLB introduced a pitch clock in 2023, cutting around 20-30 minutes off games sometimes lasting three hours or more, suggests they are but the idea that the spectacle of Banana Ball is where the game’s future might lie can’t be ignored, even if it was never the intention of Jesse Cole. “We’re not in the baseball business, never have been. We’re in the entertainment business,” he insists.
Often, the Bananas draw comparisons to basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters, the touring team celebrating their centenary this year. But that’s wide of the mark, says Cole. “We get that a lot, but the biggest difference is that we never know the result of the game,” he says.
Besides, the Bananas play in a 50-game Banana Ball league with five other teams (all operated through Cole’s Fans First Entertainment) ensuring that for all the chaos, there’s still competitive baseball being played.
“We have seriously talented players,” says Cole. “We have pitchers throwing 95 mph and guys hitting 400-feet home runs.
“But they’ve also got to be performers too — you’ll often see outfielders catching fly balls while doing backflips.”
One such player is outfielder Reese Alexiades. “The Bananas is more than just a baseball game. It is an experience of joy,” explains the 28-year-old.
“From the time you show up to the gates to the time you leave, our goal is to make sure that you experienced joy.
“You will always see something you have never seen before on a baseball field.”
There is also a huge cast of other performers who don’t play, including the Banana Nanas, a cheerleading team made up of over-65 women, comedy character Princess Potassium and the Man Nanas (a k a the Dad Bod Cheerleading Squad).
Marty Jones was a Man Nana for eight years before finally hanging up his Pom-Poms at the end of last season. “Jesse just said, ‘Why don’t we have a bunch of out-of-shape men with short shorts and sleeveless jerseys?’ ” he says. “So that’s what we did — and it was great fun.”
The fans-first ethos extends to ticket prices as well.
At Grayson Stadium, tickets sell for between $35 and $75 and you get unlimited food and drink (not beer) but with such a small capacity, you simply can’t get them.
In fact, the Bananas recently had their 250th consecutive sellout.
It’s no different when the team goes on the road, selling out giant arenas across the country and dwarfing attendances set by MLB teams.
This month, the Savannah Bananas sold out the Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans for two nights, playing to around 140,000 fans and putting them in the same kind of box office bracket as Taylor Swift and Beyonce.
“Baseball hadn’t been played in the Superdome for 20 years and then Banana Ball turns up and people loved it,” adds Cole. “It’s incredible really.”
It’s not just ticket sales.
The Savannah Bananas have also built a massive digital presence, with over 10 million TikTok followers (more than any MLB team and the official MLB account itself), alongside 4.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million YouTube subscribers.
Across all platforms, their total reach exceeds 35 million followers, far outpacing traditional baseball teams.
The team’s social media has been key, adds Professor Roberto. “The Bananas have had so much success with social media marketing, particularly on TikTok, because they have created content that is very well-suited for short-form video,” he explains.
“To some extent, they have created the product with TikTok and Instagram in mind.”
Merchandise has also played a significant part, with their Dolce & Banana range of clothing (and underwear) proving hugely popular.
When Joe Martinelli visited London with his wife recently, they bumped into some German tourists outside Buckingham Palace, all of whom were wearing Savannah Banana jerseys. “You can’t being to grasp the exposure that having the Bananas does for the city of Savannah, both in the United States and internationally,” he adds.
For Jesse Cole, meanwhile. It has been a whirlwind decade — one that has transformed this small-market baseball operator into the ringmaster of one of the sport’s most unlikely revolutions. “Sure I have to pinch myself from time to time but it’s got a life of its own and that’s because we put the fans first,” he says.
“And that’s what we’ve done with Banana Ball — we’re nothing without the fans.”
