What exactly are the Savannah Bananas becoming?

Bananaball has grown beyond the Savannah Bananas brand, with the showboating team increasingly absent from games featuring the popular style. Fans still attend in large numbers, focusing on the entertainment experience rather than the specific team. The organization shifted from collegiate summer baseball to bananaball, emphasizing trick plays, player antics, and crowd engagement. Bananaball expanded from two teams, the Bananas and the Party Animals, into a growing set of professional touring teams. Games can feature different matchups in different cities at the same time, such as the Firefighters versus the Indianapolis Clowns and the Party Animals versus the Loco Beach Coconuts. The league’s eccentric team names aim to broaden appeal.

"The Savannah Bananas brand has, arguably, become bigger than the Savannah Bananas themselves. What would seem to be a crucial component of the Bananas experience the actual team is increasingly absent from games featuring the showboating version of baseball that the Bananas themselves popularized. By all accounts, however, fans don't care. When the Guardian last examined the Bananas in 2023, the organization had only just abandoned its amateur roots in collegiate summer baseball to focus strictly on bananaball, a funhouse-mirror reflection of baseball that focuses on trick plays, player antics and crowd engagement."

"At the time, bananaball was restricted to two teams the Bananas and their forever foes, the Party Animals who seemed prepared to follow a well-trodden path to long-term, if moderate success. Basketball's Harlem Globetrotters, for example, have been running circles (often literally) around the same, scripted-to-lose opponent in exhibition games since the 1950s. The Bananas could have easily replicated this formula for decades."

"A bananaball game on a sunny May evening at Richmond's CarMax Park, however, reveals the many ways that the Bananas organization is doing things its own way. When asked, most fans outside the ballpark answered with versions of I'm going to the Savannah Bananas game tonight. But they were actually on their way to see the Firefighters take on the Indianapolis Clowns, two of the six full-time, professional bananaball teams touring the US."

"While the Firefighters and Clowns faced off in Richmond, the Party Animals were simultaneously playing the Loco Beach Coconuts in Las Vegas. Elsewhere, the Bananas drew more than 100,000 fans in College Station, Texas, against the Texas Tailgaters. What was once a pair of barnstorming exhibition teams has become a small but growing league. The Globetrotters never made this jump. The eccentric team names are part of an effort to broaden banana ball's appeal to a wider audience."

Read at www.theguardian.com