Daikin Field, Houston (Going Bananas!)

 

And now for something completely different.

The Savannah Bananas are definitely not MLB or top-level minor league. They’re also definitely fun.

With goofy rules (“Banana rules”), dancing umpires, and wacky between-inning stunts, the Bananas are unique. The Bananas bill themselves as “The Greatest Show in Sports,” and I think they almost deserve the title.

I say “almost” because I’m addicted to the competition of the game, and the quest to be the best, and the major leaguers are the best baseball players in the world.

Our nephew Danny, whom we attend an Astros game with early 2024, knew that we were interested in the Bananas, so when he heard that they were going to be in Houston, he asked if we’d be interested if he could get tickets. We jumped at the chance. He won the ticket lottery for the chance to get tickets, so we went last night with him and his father (my brother). We’d been hearing about Banana Ball for a couple of years, and it sounded great, but we hadn’t won the lottery.

A friend of ours, Owen Chandler, is a chaplain in the Army, and was stationed near Savannah a few years ago when someone told him that taking the kids to the Bananas would be a good idea. The Bananas were just starting out, and although I think they may have already been already selling out, they weren’t such a big deal that you couldn’t get a ticket in Savannah, and the Chandler kids loved it. When the Chandlers  took their kids (now between ages of about 8 and 15) to a regular baseball college game a couple of years later, the kids were horrified.

We watched a game on TV this summer, and it was OK, though not as much fun as we expected. Perhaps that was for the best, because it lowered our expectations. Put simply, seeing the Bananas in person was a blast.

Part of the problem with TV is that they focused on one thing (for example, the baseball game, or the lead between-inning activity. That means that you didn’t see the guy riding the unicycle past the on-deck circle during an at-bat, or the umpire doing pushups between innings, or … Kerry said she thought that it supplied enough input to satisfy her ADD for weeks.

I mentioned the dancing umpires, but you also get that from the break-dancing first base coach and many of the players. You think that the walk-on music for some relief pitchers is over the top? You haven’t seen the Bananas.

They have cheerleaders (something I’m not generally a fan of), but it was a bunch of overweight guys with bare midriffs.

At one point, a pitcher on stilts pitched to one batter.

The mascots for the local MLB and NFL teams showed up, as did NFL Hall of Fame player Andre Johnson, who spent his career in Houston, and rapper 50 Cent, who lives in Houston.

My favorite between-inning schtick was the race around the bases between supportive couples. The women started at home plate and ran to first base, where  they jumped on their partners’ backs. The men then carried their partners to second base, where the put them down, then had to pick them up upside down and carry them to third. At third, the woman had to pick up the man and carry him, any way she could, to home. With 41,000 cheering people, it’s a riot.

The rules

Perhaps the best is that if a foul ball goes into the stands and a fan catches it on the fly, the batter is out.

A batter can steal first. If there’s a wild pitch, the batter can head for first, and if he gets there before the throw, he’s got the base.

There’s also a rule that if a batter walks, he can advance as far as he is able before every player on the defensive team touches the ball. They refer to it as a “Ball Four Sprint,” or B4S.  If a speedster gets a B4S, he’ll take off, and the defense frantically throws the ball to each other so that they have a chance of preventing the runner from getting to second. I love this rule, but in fact, it’s clear that once a team has played it for awhile, they develop a strategy for throwing the ball around. In particular, when a count got to three balls, the outfielders would pull in by 50 feet or more. So a two-base B4S doesn’t happen that often, but it adds excitement. That defensive strategy is also a gamble. One player cranked a three-ball pitch to dead center, and it was fun to watch him run the bases as the centerfielder chased the ball. And when there was a wild pitch on a B4S, a runner on second scored easily.

There are other rules: no bunts, no mound visits, a time limit, and some others.

Although not part of the rules, the scoreboard lists the number of "trick plays" by each team. A throw between the legs from second to first counted, so did a behind-the-back catch in the outfield, or the catch of a pop fly where the player batted the ball back into the air with his glove and then caught it with his cap. Errors were not tabulated on the scoreboard, although there actually weren't many of those.  

Some other things to like about the Bananas:

The owners of the Bananas are clearly pulling in a pile of money. I don’t know how well-compensated their “cast” (yes, they use that term) is, but the do seem to be genuinely trying to make sure that the fans are having a good time. And there were some other things I really liked about the Bananas besides the wackiness.

When they’d throw out beads, or T-shirts, or yellow Bananaballs, they’d have people in the upper deck throwing them out, too.

Everything about the Bananas is yellow: the uniforms, the baseballs, the MC’s tux. The mascot is Banana Split, whose outfit you can guess. And there are lots of banana references in the music they play and in other things around the stadium. In keeping with that, one of the between inning activities is a promotion for Bananas Foster, a charity they’ve set up to celebrate and support foster care. They do a straight-up promo, and bring out a local foster family. Good for them.

At MLB games, Budweiser does a “Cheers for the Heroes” promotion between innings at some point. It started with them asking all current and former military to stand and get a round of applause. Fine, and they deserve recognition, but they’re not the only heroes. Budweiser added police, firefighters and first-responders a couple of years ago. Better.

The Bananas asked military to stand (applause)

Then they asked police and firefighters (continued applause)

Then first responders (continued applause)

Then nurses (continued applause)

Then schoolteachers (loudest applause).

I thought that was the best version I've seen.

At the end of the game, as people were leaving, one of the players gave a speech thanking everyone for coming, and reminding them that a group of people from a variety of cultures had entertained a huge group of people from all walks of life. We need more of that.

What’s not to like about the Bananas:

The only thing I didn’t like was the music, which was continuous throughout play. I didn’t mind its existence, or the selection (pop, country, rock, and rap all showed up), but I thought the volume was too high. You couldn’t have a conversation with the person next to you about any of the stunts. I think it would have been better in an outdoor stadium, or with the roof open. I know, I’m old, and get off my lawn.

The game:

Uh, with the Savannah Bananas, the details of the baseball game really don’t matter. But I do feel obligated to discuss it. The baseball (which, unlike the Harlem Globetrotters, I don’t think was scripted) was decent, and there were a couple of really nice defensive plays, including a middle infielder who made a leaping catch of a high throw and put a swipe tag on a would-be base stealer while he was still in the air.

But when it came to the 9^th inning, and it was a one-run game, the first two outs were recorded on foul balls into the stands that were caught by fans. Gotta love Bananaball

Our other digressions:

The Bananas are the latest thing we’ve done that’s baseball-related, though not part of our official quest to see all the major league and AAA minor league ballparks.

We’ve enjoyed our quest immensely. We’ve seen beauty (I like a stadium with a view), drama (who doesn’t love a walk-off game, unless your team is the one on the losing end),  pathos (the individuals struggling to make it to, or back to, the major leagues), and even comedy (the possibly illegal sale of pieces of a stadium roof, and the identification of dead bodies under the parking lot in Tampa Bay). But we’ve seen nothing nearly as humorous as the riotously funny Bananas.

Besides a lot of major league and AAA minor league parks, we’ve been to:

The Negro Leagues Hall of Fame in Kansas City.

The site where “Field of Dreams” was filmed, in Dyersville, Iowa.

The Louisville Slugger bat museum in Louisville.

Some Arizona Fall League games, featuring the stars of the upcoming years.

And we’ve bought season tickets for the first team in the Mexican winter league (Liga ARCO Mexicana del Pacífico) based north of the border, who will begin play a few miles from our house next month (more on that later).

The Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, New York, is an obvious omission here. I believe I’ve been there three times, Kerry twice. One of our joint trips was to an induction weekend, when the Diamondbacks’ Randy Johnson was enshrined. We love the place, particularly the continuous loop of the “Who’s on First” comedy routine of Abbott and Costello (I’m wearing a T-shirt dedicated to that routine as I write this!). I don’t know if they still run it, but it was almost worth the price of admission just to sit and watch it, and watch others either discover or re-discover it. We will go again, but maybe not during this quest.

Before the Bananas

There’s a long history of barnstorming teams in popular sports, with many of them in baseball. The idea is to have an entertaining team, perhaps with some stars that people would love to see, that travels from town to town. Traditionally, the barnstorming teams would focus on the smaller cities and towns that didn’t normally get the top-level competitors, although the Bananas have a slightly different business model.

Throughout the first half of the 20^th Century, many of the best Negro League players, and even Negro League teams, supplemented their incomes by barnstorming. They might play local teams, they might have two teams barnstorming together, they might have an “all-star team” in the off-season with the best players from both the white MLB and the Negro Leagues. The 1976 movie, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings is an affectionate tale of that era with an all-star (pun intended) cast.

Another long-running barnstorming baseball team was the long-bearded House of David team, which represented an offshoot Christian commune, and played against any and all comers, major leaguers, minor leaguers, negro leaguers, local teams, whoever, most notably in the 1920s, although they fielded teams as late as the 1950s. As they became more successful and played tougher competition, they added some good players. Good is an understatement. Hall of Fame pitchers Grover Cleveland Alexander, Mordecai Brown, and Satchel Paige all played with them, and although I’ve seen pictures of Babe Ruth with them in a fake beard, as far as I can tell he never played with them. His lifestyle wouldn’t mesh well with a religious commune. But the House of David teams were entertaining only because they were good and different. They weren’t showmen, per se.

The more relevant forerunners to the Bananas are Eddie Feigner’s “King and his Court” softball team of the 1950s and 1960s, and the long-running Harlem Globetrotters of basketball.

Feigner was a softball pitcher, who toured with a four-man team. Besides Feigner, there was a catcher, a first baseman, and a shortstop, in case someone actually hit a ball, but also so that they’d have someone to bat if the bases were loaded. They took on all comers. Most famously, in a celebrity game in 1967, Feigner struck out six major leaguer hitters in a row, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Brooks Robinson, Maury Wills, Robert Clemente and Harmon Killebrew, all of whom won at least one Most Valuable Player award for a season and all of whom made the All-Star team at least six times. It should be noted that hitting is all about timing, and the timing of hitting a softball hurled underhanded is very different from that of hitting a baseball thrown overhand. But it’s still impressive.

The most famous sports entertainment franchise, though, is without a doubt the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, who are about to start their 100^th touring season, an accomplishment for any business. They’ve been around longer than the National Basketball Association, and formed just a few years after the National Football League. In the mid-20^th Century, Globetrotters like Curly Neal and Meadowlark Lemon were as well known to any sports fan as any NBA player. I’ve seen them play a few times, at least once when I was six or seven years old, and at least once when my children were that age. I’ve also played basketball against a member of the Globetrotters, Sean Rooks, who came back to his alma mater, the University of Arizona, between tours once, and showed up at the regular staff pickup game a few times (he went easy on us).

The history of the Bananas

The Bananas are a long ways from becoming the institution that the Globetrotters are, but at the moment, they are a tougher ticket to get. For example, the Bananas typically play a few games in Arizona during Spring Training. A couple of years ago, I decided to get a ticket, and found that there were two ways to do it: enter a lottery, or buy it on the resale market. I entered the lottery, but never did get my name pulled, and the resale market was hundreds of dollars per ticket. Lately, they’re playing in major league baseball and NFL football stadiums, so you’d think tickets would be easier to get, but they’re still so popular that they do the lottery. Incidentally, a couple of weeks ago, I checked to see what tickets in Houston are going for on the resale market, and found that the cheapest were standing-room tickets, at $175 (plus taxes and fees) per person!

The Bananas started playing in Savannah about 10 years ago, when the city lost its minor league team after 90 years. A couple bought the team and thought they could make money by making the game more fun. They tried college-league baseball, and didn’t do so great financially, but then they ended up inventing Banana-ball rules. By now, they play about 25 games per year in Savannah, and twice as many elsewhere.

Unlike the traditional 20^th Century barnstorming teams, which focused on smaller cities and towns, the Bananas now play many of their games in big venues. The Savannah park and the Spring Training stadiums are at the bottom end. We saw them in a (sold-out) major league stadium, and they’ve also played a number of games in football stadiums, which tend to be even bigger.

Incidentally, the Globetrotters are starting their 100^th Anniversary season in Madison Square Garden in New York City. It’s not as many seats as an NFL park, but it’s a lot bigger than the gyms I’ve seen them play in.

The Bananas were fun. I suspect they might be even more fun in a smaller stadium (even without the celebrities), but I understand the economics. And they’re still fun to watch, even from the upper deck.