What MLB Could Learn From the Savannah Bananas

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ask any fan what they’d want to change about Major League Baseball and you’d hear mostly the same answers: The games take too long. The pace of play is too slow. Too many strikeouts leading to less action on the field… Enter the Savannah Bananas, a team that is thrilling fans by turning baseball into part-circus, part-professional wrestling with a dash of Harlem Globetrotters mixed in. Since arriving in the Coastal Plain League in 2016, the Savannah Bananas have sold out every night with over 4,000 fans in attendance and have a waitlist for tickets in the thousands. The team has become known for their Dancing Players, Dad Bod Cheerleading Squad, Banana Nanas Senior Citizen Dance Team, and Breakdancing First Base Coach. In 2021, The Bananas even launched a new version of baseball, Banana Ball – a new spin on the sport with a two-hour time limit where there are no walks, no bunting, and fans can catch foul balls for outs. It’s all part of a philosophy that puts fan entertainment first, and isn’t afraid to break any of baseball’s sacred traditions - and Alden Gonzalez joins us to explain how the Bananas could be changing the sport for the better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Alden Gonzalez, can you tell us what a Savannah bananas baseball game is like?
0:05.6	Like actually, how does it start?
0:07.7	Well, Pablo, of course, it starts with the time-honored tradition that is banana, baby.
0:17.0	Which as everybody knows, it's when they grab it.
0:20.6	Infant, wrap him in a banana's outfit and raise him up to the sky like Simba in the
0:27.4	like.
0:28.4	Of course, who could forget?
0:30.4	This is Wesley, he's won my show and he has run into the introduced
0:36.5	embrace and stay up all of our stuff.
0:40.4	Ladies and gentlemen, put your hand in the door for Wesley!
0:46.4	If you think though that you could just show up to a Savannah bananas game with your baby
0:56.6	and they're going to do the banana baby ritual on he or she, you are sadly mistaken, sir.
1:03.4	There is a long wait list to get your baby eligible for banana baby.
1:08.5	As a matter of fact, it is not uncommon for the women of Georgia to learn that they are
1:14.1	pregnant and the first thing they do is maybe not tell their significant other or a parent
1:18.7	but actually put their soon-to-come baby on the wait list for banana baby.
1:25.1	So there's a wait list right now as we speak for the next banana baby.
1:32.8	A long, long wait list Pablo.
1:38.4	And I just want to reiterate here because I think there could be some confusion that we
1:41.7	are still talking about a baseball game.
1:46.2	Yeah Pablo, this is a baseball team.
1:50.1	This is a team that operates out of the coastal plainly.
	...

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