Savannah Bananas are the viral sensation that is redefining baseball and its fans | News, scores, highlights, stats and rumors

If the Savannah Bananas were to literally storm a real barn now, they wouldn't stand a chance.

It feels like the Greatest Show in Sports has been everywhere in 2024, and that's pretty much the case. The Bananas are on a world tour that will stop in 29 cities and hopefully result in millions of tickets sold.

To say that things are going well would be an understatement.

The Bananas presented their special brand of baseball – it is loud, colorful, energetic, powerful.[bleep] crazy and totally entertaining – in front of sold-out crowds at Fenway Park, Nationals Park and Progressive Field. And now they'll soon be on screens everywhere.

Beginning with tonight's game at 7 p.m. ET in Norfolk, Virginia, the Bananas will be broadcast live on TruTV for the next six Fridays. The broadcasts will also be streamed on the B/R app.

The Bananas were big before, but now it feels much more real. Their virality has moved from the bubble-like confines of social media into the limitless expanse of the real world, transforming like Pinocchio from a wooden puppet tied up by strings into a real boy.

For all those who are already Bananas evangelists, it's a real treat. And for all those who aren't yet, there's something very special in it.

The bananas, briefly explained

A fun fact about bananas is that they do not look like The in the great outdoors. The soft, sweet fruits we know and love are domesticated varieties. Essentially, they are artificially created mutants that have been bred to be more palatable to the average person.

Founded in 2016 by the yellow tuxedo-wearing owner Jesse Cole, the Bananas started out as a collegiate summer team in the Coastal Plain League. And they were a good team, winning the league title in 2016, 2021 and 2022.

However, the Bananas also had a sideline or solo act as an exciting team that played their signature brand of baseball: “Banana Ball.”

The balls, bats and bases are the iconography that confirms that Banana Ball is basically just another form of baseball. But with them, the name of the game is pure sensory overload.

Overall, it's as if someone took Mike Veeck's crazy advertising spirit and pumped it full of a radioactive cocktail of a circus, professional wrestling, a music festival, and a Meow Wolf.

1. Win the inning, win the point: Games are won by points, and the points go to the team that scores the most runs in an inning. Except in the last inning, when every run counts as a point.
2. 2-hour time limit: When the clock hits zero, a new inning cannot begin.
3. No getting off: Batters who strike out earn a strike.
4. No bunting: The act is grounds for automatic deportation.
5. Stealing 1st base is allowed: The batter can run to first base on any pitch that passes the catcher.
6. No walks: When the ball is four, the batter sprints out of the box and takes as many bases as possible. Any defender must touch the ball before attempting to take the runner out of the game.
7. No mount visits: They just slow things down.
8. Fans are defenders: If a fan catches the ball, it's over.
9. Showdown tiebreaker: If the game is tied after nine innings or time has expired, it defaults to a one-on-one duel between batter and pitcher with only one fielder. The batter's goal is to score a point, while the defense's goal is to strike him out, or at least prevent the batter from scoring a point when he puts the ball in play.
10. Fan Challenge: Any viewer can challenge any decision.
11. Golden batting rule: A team can place any batter anywhere in the lineup.

The rules sound crazy, and they are. But the important thing is that they are crazy enough to work.

“It's about making it more entertaining for the fans,” Bananas pitcher Andy Archer said during the team's stay in Cleveland. “We just change the rules, like a two-hour time limit, and if the fan catches the ball, that's an out. It feels like they're part of the game. At the end of the day, the fans come first. Everything we do has that fans-first mentality.”

The comparison to the Harlem Globetrotters is inevitable, but it's not perfect, if only because the Bananas can actually lose. While the Washington Generals have never beaten the Globetrotters, the Bananas' traveling partner (dubbed “The Party Animals”) has had its share of wins, including at Fenway Park.

Maybe a small flaw, but it's part of what makes the Bananas experience so unique. And even in a boom time for baseball in general, that's why it's so hard to look away from them.

The bananas have seized the MLB's monopoly on attention

There is no more monoculture.

Certainly, many things that have always been popular are still popular, but what was once a unified landmass with common interests has, over the last half decade, broken up into many separate islands. Culture in the singular has become cults in the plural.

Attention remains a valuable currency, but it's harder to get and harder to keep. And to that end, Major League Baseball and the Bananas have found two very different but obviously successful ways to keep their attention coffers full.

For MLB, adapting to the times meant embracing shrinking attention spans. In 2023, the pitch clock, larger bases and shift limits were introduced, all designed to speed up games and make them more action-packed.

The success is undeniable. The average game time has been reduced by almost 30 minutes from 2022 to 2024. At the same time, MLB is aiming to have an average of over 30,000 fans in two consecutive seasons for the first time since 2016 and 2017.

But while the MLB meets baseball fans where they are, the Bananas used the power of memes to build their own following with almost surgical precision.

Research into what causes content to go viral includes Professor Jonah Berger's theory that emotions are key, creating “physiological arousal.” Amusement, for example, is essentially the fuel for sharing on social media.

The Bananas have always understood this, at least on an intuitive level. It is difficult to say where it all began – a 2017 Sandlot Tribute, with nearly 250,000 views on YouTube, is a likely suspect—but by now, there's no denying the sheer variety of the team's amusing moments or the widespread nature of their virus.

Here are a few calculations: The 8.8 million followers the Bananas have on TikTok are 1.4 million more than the official MLB account or exactly as many as the New York Yankees.

This victory was made possible by the wisdom of the Bananas, who did not try to beat the MLB at its own game, but instead played one that the MLB cannot possibly play.

Viral moments happen in major league games, but they're almost always organic. You can't build a brand off that kind of randomness. Not like cultivating virality through creativity and consistency, and the Bananas have mastered both.

It's like the difference between waiting for a banana plant to produce a delicious mutant and forcing that development to occur on a large scale for the masses to enjoy.

The bananas have left their mark, and permanently

The Bananas call their tour a “world tour,” but it’s more of a lap of honor.

If a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame is the ultimate proof of having left an indelible mark on the sport, then the Bananas' mark became official last fall when an exhibit in their honor opened in Cooperstown.

“We're still in the first inning, so 1,000% in the first inning. We're just getting started,” Cole said last October, according to Adam Van Brimmer the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We had a damn good first inning. But there's still a lot of playing time left.”

He could be right. But just as a cat only has nine lives, it's hard to imagine the Bananas extending their lifespan beyond nine innings.

This is where the comparison with the Globetrotters comes back into the conversation as a warning. In their heyday they played in front of up to 75,000 spectators and were a hit on television, including with their own animated series. But although they are still around today and no longer threatened with extinction, they are no longer a cultural force.

The same thing will probably happen to the Bananas one day. Their performance is amusing, but the novelty has its limits. In the long run, all funny gimmicks become boring slapstick.

On the other hand, it's also okay to brush it off and say that the Bananas can deal with it later.

What they should do – and obviously are doing – is enjoy their lap of victory.

Baseball didn't ask for the bananas, but it got them anyway. And that's for the best.