Savannah Bananas Providing Blueprint for MLB

The Savannah Bananas are the hottest thing in baseball right now. The just announced their 2025 schedule and will be playing in 3x more professional sports venues than they did this past season. This past season, the Bananas claim to have sold out every game on their tour. The Front Office Sports article on them says the Savannah Bananas drew more fans this past season than the Oakland A’s and refers to them as the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. That’s pretty amazing when you consider just a few years ago the Bananas were a small independent league team playing to half full Minor League baseball stadiums. Their path to success can be traced to one thing, they have a fun loving, innovative owner in Jesse Cole who was not afraid to go against the norm in baseball.

What can Major League Baseball learn from the Savannah Bananas? That to get the big crowds to come out, you’ve got got to put more F-U-N back in America’s past time. Our experience is that certain teams & ballparks are going to see strong demand for tickets just about every year if they are winning; we’ve had the Red Sox, Cubs, Astros & Dodgers at/near the top of our list of best selling MLB teams for almost a decade now. MLB had 71 million fans come to their games this year so they are certainly very popular. That also means that almost 15 million seats went unfilled at games in the 2024 season which is approximately 20% of the capacity of all MLB parks.

How does MLB get that extra 1/5 of stadium seats filled? Teams winning is always the #1 way to drive demand, but since that is not possible for every team to always be winning we have to explore other ideas. (Note: Baseball purest should stop reading right here, that’s because the opinions expressed here fly in the face of Major League Baseball as we know it today). Shorten the games not just by using a pitch clock, but actual hard stop time limits on games would be attractive to fans. NBA games and NFL games are generally easy for fans to project how long they will take, but baseball games are not. Start to change rules in baseball to make the game more exciting. The Bananas may do some whacky stuff in games, but they are doing it to keep fans engaged in the action. We have heard a ton of suggestions to make MLB games more exciting over the years so we will defer to those to find the specific changes to make. The bigger point is MLB needs to be willing to make big changes to the game in order to become more relevant with a large segement of the fan base. Could that alienate existing fans? Perhaps, but they may also adapt to changes and enjoy them. Shorter games with more action will create some more excitement for fans. Fans who are excited are going to buy tickets and starting filling the 20% attendance hole that MLB needs to be concerned about.

MLB doesn’t need players doing backflips like the Savannah Bananas, but they do need to inject more fun into games to appeal to a wider audience and keep them coming back.

Image credit: Sportico article