THE FEEL-GOOD HIT of the summer is without a doubt the Savannah Bananas.
The wildly successful new college summer league team selling out nearly every game in Grayson Stadium isn’t just a marketing lollapalooza.
They offer some concrete, pragmatic, teachable moments about our little town, about things we can do to make it better.
If you’ve been to a Bananas game, you know what I’m talking about: It ain’t anything like the old Sand Gnats.
If you haven’t, here’s the deal:
It’s college players playing real baseball, i.e. wood bats instead of the ridiculous aluminum bats the NCAA forces them to use in the regular season when they’re back at school.
College Students + No NCAA = More Fun. So once a game, Bananas players come out between innings and shake their butts to “Apache (Jump On It).”
Later, players will come into the stands with a red rose to give away to ladies of all ages and descriptions, a particularly sweet touch.
The players—not subject to the brutal on-the-bus, off-the-bus, what-town-is-this-again grind of the typical minor league pro season—are clearly happy to do what they do and enjoy the crowd interaction. From what I’ve seen, it’s difficult for a kid not to come away with a Banana’s autograph or two or three.
Indeed, there are more kids, and more younger kids, at a Bananas game than I ever saw at a Sand Gnats game.
The all-you-can-eat wristband option makes it an affordable night out to feed a family. You can of course enjoy, you guessed it, chocolate-covered bananas. (And the alcohol license is vital to getting adults out, same as with the Sand Gnats.)
While everyone said they hated the name “Bananas” when first announced, the genius of the moniker is apparent in the way every piece of marketing collateral, every color scheme, every silly game for the fans between innings ties into the familiar long yellow fruit in some way.
(Including some mild double entendres for the adults to snicker over while the kids enjoy the goofiness.)
The young owner of the team, Jesse Cole, spends each game walking the stands suited up as a sort of bright yellow Willie Wonka, taking pics with fans with his selfie stick, throwing out free T-shirts, and pumping up the crowd.
The concessions and ticketing staff are all new hires and all smiles. They are as perky and personable as some of the former concessions workers at Grayson were, um, blasé, to put it charitably.
While technically the team mascot is Split—a hypermasculine banana wearing Oakleys and a pro wrestler’s cape—the real mascot is Daisy the Bat Dog, an adorable little rescue pup who goes for a walk through the stands.
And oh, yeah, about the games themselves: Surprisingly competitive and surprisingly fun.
Because the pitching, while pretty good, is still a bit under pro standards, there’s lots of offense.
How much offense? The last game I went to the Bananas won 26-4. Not a typo! (The manual scoreboard at Grayson only goes up to 20. So by the seventh inning they had to just leave the 20 up there.)
The single thing that strikes me most about what the Bananas have done is what you see now in the ground level concourse: They installed a Walk of Fame honoring six fan-picked iconic players who played in Grayson Stadium.
Names like Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Lou Gehrig. The very biggest names, names we’ve known forever that played here.
But curiously, names which neither the City nor any of the other teams to play in Grayson ever took the effort to honor in this manner.
Such a simple thing, right? A real no-brainer.
In the decades of minor league ball in Savannah, why didn’t anyone think of honoring those famous visiting players before? It seems so obvious, painfully so, not only from a historical perspective but from a marketing perspective.
But that’s one of the lessons the Bananas have for Savannah: Don’t Screw Up The No-Brainers. Or in this case it might be more on-point to say, “Go For The Low-Hanging Fruit.”
Other lessons the Bananas teach the Savannah business and political community:
Always Be Nice. It costs nothing to smile and be pleasant to customers. But for some reason it’s becoming less and less common in this city known for hospitality. I can think of vanishingly few restaurants and stores in Savannah who aren’t in some need of this advice.
Offer True Value. Turns out Savannah really will enthusiastically support a baseball team—just not the Sand Gnats! The Bananas’ focus on providing lots of entertainment for little money is the ticket. It seems the dubious “prestige” of being associated with the Major League farm system is completely immaterial to us.
Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously. And I don’t just mean Banana costumes.
Not long ago City leaders pushed a brand-new, taxpayer-funded, big-city style stadium downtown to host the Savannah Sand Gnats, who had trouble selling out little old Grayson Stadium.
Build it and they will come, was the mantra. Give baseball to the tourists and charge them, and taxpayers, accordingly.
Given the Bananas’ success today, can you imagine if we’d gone ahead with that? The mind reels.
Savannah isn’t a shiny new big-city stadium kind of place. And that’s OK.
Savannah’s the kind of place where families can go enjoy themselves on a hot summer night, cheering the thwack of ball on bat, watching the grounds crew in banana outfits lip-sync to boy band tunes, all within the walls of a humble but historic place walked by the friendly ghosts of the biggest giants of the great American game.
The lesson of the Bananas is: We should try and be the best Savannah we can be.
Related Stories
Savannah Bananas’ Jesse Cole will help you Find Your Yellow Tux
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2016.
no new stadium
murray@itried2tellya
Meh, it really depends how one looks at it all.
For instance, if you don’t care about the caliber of baseball, which, from what I’ve seen, is not up to par with even Sally ball, then I suppose the Bananas are just what the doctor ordered. Likewise, if all you care about is entertainment or more specifically, keeping your ADHD cherubs entertained, then a campy Bananas extravaganza is what you are looking for.
The guy appears to know how to sell the sizzle yet “true” baseball fans like myself just get more wistful for the days of the professional Sand Gnats. Make no mistake, that reserve which you might have confused for despondency from Sand Gnat players was really just young ball players with big league aspirations playing out a big league-like schedule and having to do so for an entire summer. These Bananas will only be able to entertain you for two months instead of the FIVE for which the Gnats laced ’em up.
Really, if you don’t mind the “quality” of the fans that share and more relevantly, “create” the stadium experience for you, then a Bananas game is your cup of tea. You mention the friendliness of the concession folks and I realize that they are stilling learning the “systems” as they go, but it appears as though these folks have chosen “amicability” over actual “competence and expedition.” This newest crop or rather, legion of fans that attend the ball park strikes me as less interested in actual baseball than they are at gorging upon whatever new and loudly promoted entertainment vehicle rears its head. The Bananas phenomenon is basically Savannah’s claim to imitate America’s consumerism in the most common denominator of ways. This is great for people who enjoy the campiness and the pageantry but not so good for those who go to see baseball first and foremost. If you value things like a reasonable level of courtesy and couth from the “fans” who share the ball park with you, then maybe the Bananas are a baseball experience best seen sparingly.
I use the word fans in quotations because it is tongue-in-cheek. From what I’ve seen, the people going bananas for the Bananas are there to see the spectacle, not so much for America’s past time and certainly not for it to be played at as high a level as possible. NO, Savannah never needed a new stadium…more relevantly, the people who eat up Banana-ball and all its monkey business never needed a new stadium.
However, the true baseball fans of Savannah remain split on that.