Banana Ball (Savannah Bananas vs. the Firefighters) @ Fenway Park (Boston, MA)

A very, VERY deep dive into the "Greatest Show in Sports"

*This trip occurred on July 6, 2025, and I had so many thoughts on what happened that I’ve had to structure this post a bit differently than my other posts (case in point: my draft for this was SEVENTEEN PAGES LONG). To save everyone's sanity from having to scroll for all of that, I've broken this post into multiple parts - this one obviously being the intro.

• PART 2
• PART 3
• CONCLUSION

The Savannah Bananas (and friends)

If you've been following baseball as a sport, you probably know at least a little bit about the Savannah Bananas. For those who don't, here's a short-ish history:

Savannah, GA, was home to various minor league baseball teams throughout the 20th century and early 2000s. The most recent one - the Savannah Sand Gnats (who I used to have a t-shirt for) - left town in 2015 (they’re now in Columbia, SC as the Columbia Fireflies). The following year, a bold entrepreneur founded the Savannah Bananas, filling the void left by the Sand Gnats.

Originally a member of the summer collegiate Coastal Plain League, they became famous for their on the field antics during games - things like a dance troupe composed of older women, a player on stilts, and a guy who did his own PA intro. These antics turned the team into media darlings; home games were consistently sold out, and they were even (seemingly) pulling in fans on the road; I thought about going to a game in Wilmington, NC one year while on vacation, but it was sold out when I looked into getting tickets (and it also rained that day, which made things iffy).

Outside of their CPL team, the most notable thing they did was in 2018, when they debuted a new set of rules for their version of baseball which came to be known as “Banana Ball". As part of this, a second "house team" - the (Savannah) Party Animals - was added to serve as a "foil" to the Bananas (though they were nowhere near as bad as the Washington Generals). The Bananas and Party Animals played their first game of Banana Ball in 2020, and a year later, they played their first game outside of Savannah in Mobile, AL.

In 2022, after winning the Coastal Plain League for the second year in a row and the third time overall, they decided to leave the league and go "full Harlem Globetrotters" - focusing solely on Banana Ball¹. They embarked on their first “Banana Ball World Tour” in 2023 - consistently selling out stadiums and drawing massive media attention. In 2024, they added Major League Baseball stadiums into the mix, as well as a new team: the Firefighters, who were the other team I saw at this game (plus they booked a damn CRUISE SHIP vacation for the entire org + fans). In 2025, they added the Texas Tailgaters, and announced that at the end of the 2025 tour, a "Banana Ball Tour Championship Series" will be played to determine an overall "champion" of the tour.

Two more teams are being added in 2026, which will also see an organized “Banana Ball Championship League” start up with each team playing 60 games (which translates to a whopping 180 total Banana Ball games next year).

...So what the heck is Banana Ball?

Banana Ball is, in essence, a modified version of baseball. The team lists eleven rules that make it distinct (these are taken directly from the Banana Ball website):

There’s also a few rule differences between Banana Ball and regular baseball that are not part of the official Banana Ball rules:

• Each team has TEN batters in their lineup (as opposed to the standard nine). This rule - referred to as the “Extra Hitter” - is rather rare amongst professional baseball competitions; it’s more common below high school varsity level (and don’t get me started on Little League).
• Each team also has a “Designated Runner” (alluded to in the Golden Batter rule) - I.e. a guy whose main job is to just be a pinch runner, but can be used multiple times per game (as opposed to being a full substitution like in baseball).

I’ll give my full thoughts on these rules later, but in short: this is basically “lightning baseball”, and could honestly stand on its own as a fun-to-watch baseball variant (even without the on-field antics).

UP NEXT

Tickets and the "easiest" way to get them (aka the reason this post got SO LONG).

PART 2