Savannah Bananas pack Nationals Park with unique brand of baseball

August 12, 2024

Just before 2 p.m. Saturday, Princess Potassia — wearing her signature bright yellow dress, white gloves and a sparkling gold tiara — serenaded the crowd gathered outside the center field gate at Nationals Park with a baseball-inspired take on “Be Our Guest” from “Beauty and the Beast.”

“Be our fans, be our fans, come along and clap your hands,” the Savannah Bananas entertainer sang. “Get ready for the greatest show in sports — throughout the land!”

Moments later, the gates opened and a horde of giddy yellow-clad fans streamed into the center field plaza, where they were greeted by Bananas staff members in banana costumes and signs directing them to yellow tents selling Bananas merchandise. The Harlem Globetrotters-esque show wouldn’t stop for more than seven hours.

The barnstorming Bananas, who are in the midst of a sold-out 96-game 2024 world tour that includes stops at six major league ballparks, may not be exactly what former Nationals star Bryce Harper had in mind when he launched his “Make Baseball Fun Again” campaign in 2016, but there’s no arguing with the zany exhibition squad’s appeal. (Someone get Anthony Rendon to a game.)

Saturday’s announced sellout crowd of 42,000 was the largest in Banana Ball history. Nationals Park hadn’t been so loud since Juan Soto’s liner to right field skipped under the glove of Milwaukee’s Trent Grisham in the 2019 National League wild-card game.

The Bananas, a former summer collegiate team in the Coastal Plain League that went out on its own in 2022, play by their own set of rules, which were helpfully explained for any first-timers before Saturday’s 4-3 win over the Firefighters, another exhibition team owned by Bananas founder Jesse Cole. Bunting, walks, mound visits and stepping out of the batter’s box are prohibited, and foul balls caught by fans in the stands count as outs. Games feature a two-hour time limit and a unique scoring system that awards points for winning an inning.

The elaborate pregame and in-game entertainment is scripted down to the minute, but the baseball, contested by former college and minor league players and interspersed with choreographed celebrations, walk-ups and trick plays, is real. Bananas center fielder DR “The Doc” Meadows made a backflip catch for the second out of the second inning.

“It’s not strict, so it’s not how real baseball is,” said 11-year-old Tyler Arnoto of Gainesville, who attended the game with his parents and two sisters, Kinley and Everly. “It’s fun.”

Arnoto brought in a homemade sign for Bananas left fielder and former Nationals signee RobertAnthony Cruz, known as Coach RAC to his large number of fans on social media, where he posts baseball coaching videos. Before his second at-bat, the viral video Cruz posted to TikTok after he surprised his dad, Ron, with the news that Washington had signed him as an undrafted free agent in 2021 played on the scoreboard. Cruz saluted the crowd before making his way to home plate, where his dad greeted him with a hug.

“It was surreal,” Cruz said before the game of walking into Nationals Park for a scrimmage Friday. “I took a moment up in the stands by myself. … I hit a ball off the top of the wall, so I’m hoping that some in-game adrenaline will push that ball out.”

In his third at-bat, Cruz homered to right field before grabbing an American flag and leading his entire team in a trot around the bases.

After they struck out on getting tickets through the lottery announced last fall, Sarah Thomas and Jeremy Hedlund of D.C. decided to splurge for Diamond Club seats a few weeks ago. They wore banana hats that encircled their faces for the occasion.

“I hadn’t seen the Bananas until last week when we were watching ESPN and they were on,” said Hedlund, who has never been to a Nationals game. “I didn’t know they were that big.”

“Looking at the merch line, I’m having flashbacks to a Taylor Swift concert,” said Thomas, who discovered the Bananas on TikTok. “We were on the Metro, and everyone was in yellow. It’s great. We love this kind of baseball. This is our jam. Keep it fun, keep it quick.”

The concourses Saturday were Opening Day-like, a sea of bright yellow jerseys and linen shirts featuring every banana print known to man. In the hours before the first pitch — and the start of the two-hour countdown clock — at 7 p.m., fans were treated to performances by a magician, the Bananas’ dad bod cheerleading squad (the “Man-Nanas”) and the home plate umpire, who twerked after being introduced.

The second inning featured a dueling singalong to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” between the first base and third base sides of the park. Former Nationals fan favorite Gio González received one of the loudest cheers of the night when he was introduced as a guest pitcher before throwing a perfect inning for the Bananas in the third. Ashton Lansdell of the U.S. women’s baseball team pitched for the Bananas in the fourth and faced her national team teammate (and Firefighters manager) Val Perez.

Saturday’s game was a homecoming for the Bananas’ Danny Hosley and the Firefighters’ South Trimble, both of whom ended their college baseball careers at George Mason. Hosley, a first-team All-Met selection at Langley as a senior in 2017, distributed 50 tickets to friends and family.

“Just getting to interact with so many different fans has been pretty unbelievable,” Hosley, who pitched the ninth inning Saturday, said of his two years with the team. “A lot of the fans we get haven’t come to a baseball game before, and then they come to this and just enjoy the heck out of it.”

“It’s all about making it memorable for the kids,” Trimble said.

Clark Harris, 10, of Front Royal, Va., had been looking forward to his first Bananas game since he received tickets from his grandfather for Christmas. He said he was most excited to see the Bananas’ “tall kid” — Dakota Albritton, who plays on stilts. Albritton grounded out as a pinch hitter in the fifth.

Myersville, Md., resident Jim Assurian and his family, who have attended a half-dozen Bananas games since first seeing the team in Savannah in 2021, worked Saturday’s game as ticket scanners.

“We still follow major league baseball, but I’ve got to tell you, the Bananas have had an effect on us, and it’s kind of boring,” said Assurian, who went to Friday’s Yankees-Orioles game in Baltimore. “We’re expecting the nonstop action and energy. It’s strange when we go to regular games now.”

The Bananas, who have played at Minute Maid Park and Fenway Park this year, will make stops at major league ballparks in Cleveland, Philadelphia and Miami over the next three months. Cole, the Bananas’ yellow-tuxedo-wearing founder, has grander plans for 2025.

“Right now, we have 2.7 million people on the wait list for tickets,” he said. “We have a lot of fans we want to take care of. We’ve got a big vision. We’re just getting started.”

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