Consider me a skeptic.
If you’re a parent with a baseball-crazed child of a certain age, you likely found yourself at Dudy Noble Field on Friday or Saturday night.
There, among the usual trappings of a Mississippi State baseball game – excruciating concession lines, throngs of people wandering aimlessly around the concourse – could be found Mississippi’s first-ever live showcase of “Banana Ball.”
If you’ve been living under a rock or outside the orbit of an 8-year old, Banana Ball, founder Jesse Cole’s high-energy baseball/variety show/music festival hybrid, is to America’s pastime what the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball; silly, unnecessary and a whole lot of fun.
Now expanded to four teams under the Banana Ball banner (including the ubiquitous Savannah Bananas), Starkville’s tour stop pitted the Party Animals against the Texas Tailgaters.
Apparently a mere 30,000 tickets sold across two nights isn’t enough to get the Bananas on the bus anymore.
But for the hordes of children (and some young-at-heart adults) in attendance, none of that mattered. This was The Show, and they were here to soak in every trick play, every foul ball and every choreographed dance routine.
The game’s special rules are many. Foul balls caught by fans in the stands are outs, trick plays have their own column on the scoreboard, games have a two-hour time limit and stealing first base is encouraged. But beyond the window dressing, what you’d normally recognize as baseball is still on full display.
The pitchers throw hard, the batters hit hard, and the fielders make difficult plays look easy and easy plays look cool.
Banana Ball shares another important characteristic with Major League Baseball, one that’s likely to keep it sustainable for years, maybe decades, to come. It makes money. Lots of it.
Cole and his organization keep everything in-house, from ticketing to merchandising to media rights, cutting out the middleman while increasing profits and mitigating expenses. And if my anecdotal observations of the crowd reflect reality, business is good.
I didn’t see a single child without at least one piece of Banana Ball gear or a branded souvenir. I imagine the elementary schools in Starkville resemble a Party Animals dugout this week.
Though Fans First Entertainment (which owns and operates Banana Ball and all its teams) is a privately held company, there are reports the firm is now worth north of $1 billion. A typical game might bring in more than $200,000 in revenue. Based on my credit card statement, that number checks out.
And while Banana Ball is definitely a business, it’s also much more than that. It’s pure, unadulterated joy. The fans are smiling, the players are smiling; heck, even the umpires are in on the fun. They know their product makes people happy, something more people should spend a lot more time focusing on. Even a skeptic like me can get behind that.
Philip Poe is sports editor.
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