Born in NC, baseball’s Savannah Bananas return to Charlotte and sellout crowds
They are a baseball phenomenon, a golden ticket every night leading to packed stadiums and ecstatic fans. The Savannah Bananas not only sell out everywhere they go, but they will fill 75,000 seats in Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium both Friday and Saturday night. Because demand is so great, a lottery system had to be instituted to decide which fans got a chance to buy tickets. Banana Ball is, remarkably, the closest thing in sports to the Taylor Swift “Eras” Tour.
And all of this was born in…..
Gastonia?!
Strange but true. It was in Gaston County that Savannah Bananas founders Jesse and Emily Cole first ran a team (the Gastonia Grizzlies) and first got engaged in 2014. It’s also where they still live with their three children, who are 7, 6 and 3.
“So this weekend in Charlotte will be a homecoming for us,” Emily Cole said. “Jesse and I have lived in this area for close to 20 years. We are foster parents here. Even when we got a team in Savannah, we had a place there, but we never quite left Gaston County.”
For the uninitiated, “Banana Ball” aims to remove all the boring parts from baseball. Games are limited to two hours. There is no stepping out of the batter’s box, no bunting and no mound visits. There is a lot of music, dancing, trick plays and comedy sketches. A foul ball caught by a fan counts as an out. One of the pitchers plays on stilts. And that’s just the beginning, although you don’t need to know all or really any of the rules to enjoy the show.
The rules changes bother some baseball purists, of course. Otherwise, Banana Ball is a monster hit, one that is expanding every year. There are currently four teams, all owned by the Coles’ company, playing “Banana Ball” on two separate tours running concurrently around the country. Next year there will be six “Banana Ball” teams.
The Charlotte stop this weekend will feature the two headliners playing each other: the original Savannah Bananas vs. the Party Animals.
Like many so-called overnight sensations, the “Banana Ball” concept took shape over a period of years. Selling out Bank of America Stadium — as well as putting 80,000-plus fans in Clemson’s sold-out Death Valley in April — didn’t magically happen.
The first signs of all this began in Gastonia, where the Coles worked for the Gastonia Grizzlies for close to a decade. Jesse Cole was a former pitcher at Wofford College in Spartanburg who also took theater there and thought all ballparks could be livened up.
At the time, the Grizzlies were populated by college players in a summer league, played low-level minor-league baseball in the Coastal Plain League. Jesse and Emily Cole ran the team — Emily’s title was “director of fun” — and were there all the time. In 2014, they got engaged at a Gastonia Grizzlies game, between innings, followed by a mid-game fireworks show.
Jesse Cole proposed in a yellow tux — he had made that outfit his signature well before the Bananas even existed in their current form. Now he wears a yellow tux and yellow hat to every public appearance. “He owns nine of them,” Emily said, laughing.
Once the couple had bought the team in 2014, they tried out some more of their ideas.
“It was traditional baseball, and we would sprinkle in the fun between innings as much as we could,” Emily Cole said. “But we had to stick to the real rules…. The players would do dances. But it was quick, and it was between innings. It was just a dabble, because everybody else in the league didn’t want any of it. ... You know, everything is an evolution. At the time to us, it didn’t really occur that we could just make up new rules and start a league.”
The Coles then bought a team in Savannah, Ga., named them the Bananas and played in the exact same league as the Grizzlies. Both Jesse and Emily Cole had seen hundreds of minor-league baseball games by then and had noticed something: If a game started at 7 p.m., it didn’t really matter how good the game was. By 9 p.m., people were packing up and leaving, thinking about what they had to do the next day and getting the kids home. That sort of mass exodus generated the idea of two-hour baseball game.
For a couple of years in the late 2010s, the Savannah Bananas played normal baseball in the summer but experimented with the “Banana Ball” ideas in the spring. Their first “world tour” constituted one stadium and one game, in Mobile, Ala., Emily Cole said.
“The next spring we did it in seven cities and did seven games,” she said. “And the following year, we knew that this was something we needed to go all in on. So at that point, in 2021, we left the Coastal Plain League completely, and started our own full-time barnstorming, traveling Banana Ball.”
While the Bananas are often compared to the Harlem Globetrotters, basketball’s longtime clown princes, there is a key difference. While going to a Globetrotters performance means you’ll also see the Globetrotters win against their hapless opponents, that’s not guaranteed with the Bananas.
“That’s one of the misconceptions,” Emily Cole said. “We’re big fans of the Globetrotters, and we commend them for everything that they are. But it is different in the sense that none of our games are scripted to any degree... We will script the music and the emotions and the smells and the fun and the laughter that we want you to have. But when it comes to the competitive play on the diamond, we don’t touch any of it. So the Party Animals (the Bananas’ opponent this weekend) are actually a stronger team. They won the championship two years ago, and they are very much a stronger team this year than the Bananas.”
In the early years, finding high-level baseball players who wanted to totally buy in to Banana Ball was “very difficult,” Cole said
“Nobody wanted to play for the team that did all the dancing,” she said. “Now we’re very fortunate that we have thousands of athletes who reach out to us, and they are top athletes. They’ve played professional baseball. A lot of them have played in all levels of the minor leagues…. They are just looking for something else. They’re also usually entertainers. They come to us already having that personality of somebody who doesn’t want to act so seriously, somebody who wants to color outside of the lines.”
The Coles’ other passion is foster parenting. They have a biological son and two daughters whom they adopted after fostering them. Their non-profit organization, called Bananas Foster, celebrates and supports foster families in every city where the Bananas play.
If you go: Savannah Bananas in Charlotte
Tickets for the Savannah Bananas this weekend in Charlotte are sold out, although they are available on numerous secondary markets for highly inflated prices (most of the tickets were originally $35). On their website, the Bananas advise against buying tickets on secondary markets due to the risk of fraud.
If you do have tickets, both Friday and Saturday night games start at 7 p.m. at Bank of America Stadium, with earlier activities occurring outside the stadium. The schedule:
11 a.m.-1 p.m.: Early merchandise sales
2 p.m.: Pregame party begins
2 p.m.: Player appearances
3 p.m.: Before the Peel show
4:30 p.m.: Bank of America gates open
6:30 p.m.: Pregame show inside stadium
7 p.m.: Game begins: Savannah Bananas vs. Party Animals
9 p.m. (approximately): Game ends
This story was originally published June 4, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
