In Anaheim this summer, more than 45,000 fans packed Angel Stadium for two nights — an event so popular that resale tickets topped those for a Dodgers–Yankees rematch across town. But step inside Angel Stadium and you’d see something like baseball — just with more dancing, backflips, and players on stilts. You’d see the Savannah Bananas.

Founded in 2015 in Savannah, Georgia, as a collegiate summer league team in the Coastal Plain League, the Savannah Bananas have become a national sensation by giving America’s favorite pastime a bit more fun.

The Bananas don’t compete in a traditional league. They play exhibition games against a rotating cast of novelty teams, the most prominent being their in-house rivals, the Party Animals. It’s like baseball’s very own Harlem Globetrotters.

Within their first season, every home game sold out. By 2023, they launched a national “Banana Ball World Tour,” in ballparks across the country. In said tour, the Bananas played 86 games in 33 ballparks before more than half a million fans. At the recent end of their 2025 season, there are now six teams in their league, and they’ve expected to have entertained over two million people.

Their business is certainly booming from a financial perspective: A two-night stop in Charlotte brought in $38.6 million to the local economy. In 2025, they sold out 18 Major League Baseball stadiums and even three football stadiums with capacities exceeding 70,000.

“A major league baseball team doesn't get those types of numbers,” said Abraham Madkour, publisher and executive editor of Sports Business Journal.

Part of their success is in the numbers. Because they aren’t tied to Major League Baseball’s structures, their running costs are dramatically lower. While players haven’t revealed what they earn, they have confirmed to Forbes that they make more than the $50,000 a typical minor-league player makes. But it’s nowhere near the multi-million-dollar contracts that major league players have. 

That, combined with sold-out stadiums at $35-$60 a ticket, makes for a profitable model. Forbes estimates the organization will post more than $100 million in revenue due to their success this year, turning a profit, something 11 MLB clubs, including the New York Mets and Yankees, couldn’t pull off last season.

Baseball has long faced a problem: to many casual fans — especially younger ones — the game can feel slow. In an age of ten second TikToks, a three-and-a-half-hour game doesn’t sound super appealing. Even Major League Baseball has been experimenting with pitch clocks and pace-of-play rules to make games move faster.

But this isn’t Major League Baseball. It’s Banana Ball, a renewed take on the game with a focus on entertainment; there is a two-hour time limit, teams receive points for innings won instead of runs scored, bunts are banned, and if a fan catches a foul, it's out.

The rule changes aren’t the main draw to their games though, that would be the entertainment.

“During the game, it's constant motion. There is a constant action or skits of entertainment or music, or sidebars of storylines going on all the time. You have people dancing, you have people doing backflips, you have contests,” said Madkour. “It keeps the pace moving. Major league baseball gets criticized at times for a slower pace of play. They've taken a lot of steps to change that. You can't say the Bananas are slow.”

To Alexander Les, a professor at the Darden school of Business, the owners of the Bananas, Jesse and Emily Cole, are reinventing what baseball can be.

“What I saw here was that they took the game of baseball that you could arguably say has been around since, like the 1840s or so, and they totally reenvisioned it,” Les said. “They took a market in baseball; sports entertainment more broadly and just disrupted it with the changes that they were making to make the experience much more entertaining for the fans.”

The Bananas have found a bullseye with younger audiences and families. Parents bring their kids because it’s short and sweet — a low-stakes introduction to baseball that can keep up with a child’s short attention span.

But not everyone is sold. To hardcore baseball purists, the antics may come off as cheap tricks and corny sideshows that distract from the baseball itself. But again, this isn’t traditional baseball.

Beyond the rule changes, the Bananas have adjusted the entire experience to stand apart from an average ballgame. For example, most MLB teams open their gates 90 minutes before games. The Bananas do things differently.

“The fans will go hours before the game and engage with the team. Like in the Plaza around the stadium they're going there to interact with the players who will come and sign autographs with the fans,” Les said. “They're there to see the musical performance of maybe a band that they have. There's all this pregame activity that starts hours before the actual first pitch ever occurs.”

And unlike most stadiums, there isn’t a single ad displayed on the sidelines.

“If you go to a football stadium, college, NFL, etcetera, there's always advertising all over the place and fans are saturated with it and to a degree, I think they get tired of it,” Les said. “So there was a refreshing thing for them to remove all the corporate sponsorship from the entire stadium when they were playing.”

Those inside the organization claim that their focus is on the fans, not the bottom line.

“It's been interesting to be around them because obviously there's a business behind what they're doing, right, but what they lead with is not the business aspect of it,” Les said. “It's their cultural dynamic of fans first, entertain always. They are so focused on the fans' experience, the economic success is almost secondary. They know that if they create a good fan experience, the economic success will come as a byproduct of that.”

The idea is pretty simple: make a good product, and people will buy it. So far, it’s worked. 

“Their media strategy has been excellent. Their social strategy has been excellent,” Madkour said. “The way they're able to get highlights and clips and have videos of their players on stilts playing baseball. All of that makes for great viral moments where fans, families, and young people see that and they're like, I want to go check that out.”

Right now, the Bananas are complementary to the MLB and are treated as a separate product, not competition. As Madkour put it, they “have played along nicely”. After all, the Bananas never claimed to be the majors. That being said, the number of butts in seats hasn’t gone unnoticed. 

“[Major League] Baseball probably looks at the Savannah Bananas as a little bit envious,” Madkour said. “They sold out Bank of America football stadium for two nights — that’s more than 70,000 people.” 

And who knows? Maybe the Bananas will have an influence on Major League Baseball. In a similar vein, the Harlem Globetrotters specialized in creative ball handling, trick shots, and dunking, which was generally seen as goofing around at the time. But now those tricks are a standard part of the NBA game.

For a team that began as an experiment in a small Georgia ballpark, the Bananas have grown into an act that rivals the big leagues. And yet, beneath the spectacle, there’s something almost wholesome about their success. Les put it best:

“I've been to a number of professional sporting events, this is the first one that after the game I ever received a handwritten note from one of the players thanking me for attending,” Les said.

And maybe that makes all the difference.