We’re not in the baseball business. We’re in the entertainment business.”

demand for tickets is the demand for a top-five media market in the country, and we only have 3,500 people we can fit here. It’s going to be a crazy, exciting Tuesday night in July.”

The Bananas were founded on a simple idea: Baseball can be boring.

In 2016, Jesse and Emily Cole purchased a struggling summer collegiate baseball team in Savannah, Georgia, and realized fans weren’t all that interested in the product on the field. So they created a new one.

“We’re not in the baseball business,” Jesse Cole said. “We’re in the entertainment business.”

In the process, they’ve created an unexpected empire. The Bananas, a moniker picked by fans in a name-the-team contest, have become a national sensation.

Initially, the hook was ingame entertainment that relied heavily on goofy dance routines by the players and leaned into the absurd. And people loved it. The Bananas have sold out every game since 2016 and have a ticket waitlist of more than 500,000 fans. They have more than 4 million Tik-Tok followers (that’s more than the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers, Cubs and Giants have combined). They have been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and in a five-part ESPN documentary, among other media outlets.

But Cole thinks this summer’s

“Banana Ball” tour will change the sports world forever.

“I believe ‘Banana Ball’ is one of the most entertaining and greatest games in the world,” Cole said. ““And I believe there’s the possibility it’ll be the ‘Game of the Future.’”

When the Coles bought the team, franchise survival seemed to be a long shot. They reached out to the Savannah community of about 400,000 people for potential customers and found just one person willing to commit to season tickets.

With little to lose, they got creative. They hired a choreographer who knew nothing about baseball to be the first base coach. They hired a pep band, a “DadBod” cheerleading team called the Man-Nanas and another made up of women in their late 60s called the Banana Nanas. Each game, there was a designated “Banana Baby” who would be picked to wear a banana suit.

On the field, the baseball was traditional. But the players, recruited from colleges around the country to play in the wood-bat Coastal Plain summer league, began to participate in the midgame dance routines. The unlikely mix was a success. Not only did 4,000-seat Grayson Stadium become the place to be entertained between innings, the Bananas won on the field, capturing league

The Bananas have sold out every game since 2016 – with a waiting list for more than 500,000 tickets — and it won’t be any different as they take their show on the road. Tens of thousands of ticket-seeking fans contacted the San Jose Giants shortly after the game was announced. San Jose’s stadium only holds 3,500 fans.