Baseball isn’t boring and the CW isn’t silly, not less than on the subject of the Savannah Bananas, the Georgia-based workforce that has rewritten the principles across the traditional American pastime. The community has picked up rights to broadcast the July 27 Bananas sport at Citizen’s Financial institution Park in Philadelphia.
“Banana Ball” incorporates humor, gymnastics, lip syncs and snappy dance choreography in a minor league baseball sport with guidelines that positively don’t match these of Main League Baseball — although lots of the gamers as soon as had MLB aspirations. This yr the workforce has offered out 18 main league ballparks, plus three soccer stadiums with capacities of greater than 70,000.
The CW lately has been leaning into reside sports activities protection, which has typically been delivering rankings ends in a quickly altering TV-viewing panorama. The community has the NASCAR Xfinity Sequence, WWE NXT on Tuesday nights, Grand Slam Monitor, AVP seaside volleyball on summer season Saturdays, ACC and Pac-12 soccer video games within the fall and, beginning subsequent yr, PBA skilled bowling.
The Savannah Bananas include a built-in viewers earned through posts on TikTok, Fb Reels and the like. The workforce has 10 million followers on TikTok alone.
The Savannah Bananas, a minor league baseball membership, went on their first ever “World Tour” this yr, taking their distinctive model of baseball to varied cities throughout America.
“We’ve always been very clear about our goal,” Bananas proprietor Jesse Cole advised The Occasions in 2022. “We exist to make baseball fun.”
“It’s all about energy. We want to give people energy, delivering it every second, from the moment we open the gates at two o’clock until the last fan leaves at 11,” he added over the weekend, when the workforce performed to a sellout crowd at Anaheim Stadium.
There’s positively an viewers urge for food for the Savannah workforce: There are tickets out there for video games in August and September, however solely by way of a lottery — and the wait checklist for the lottery is greater than 3 million names lengthy. Final season’s video games drew one million followers whole.
On Friday, the one method into the Anaheim sport was by way of the resale market. Hours earlier than the primary pitch, the bottom worth (charges and taxes included) for a pair of Bananas tickets on StubHub was $209.52, whereas it took a mere $171.72 to snag a pair of tickets to the Yankees-Dodgers sequence opener at Dodger Stadium the identical evening.
Who wants Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Choose anyway: Banana Ball has the Savannah workforce going through rival outfits the Texas Tailgaters, the Firefighters, the Social gathering Animals and the Guests.
And whereas Ohtani and Choose might be counted on for a number of residence runs, solely the Bananas ship child races, a dancing umpire and backflips earlier than balls are caught within the outfield. Plus the video games are restricted to 2 hours max, one thing even the much-loved MLB pitch clock can’t ship.
“The Savannah Bananas have taken the sports world by storm through their high-energy blend of baseball and entertainment that connects with viewers of all ages,” Mike Perman, senior vice chairman of CW Sports activities, mentioned in an announcement Tuesday.
“We are thrilled to partner with them for their broadcast television debut, and we cannot wait to bring our audience every unpredictable play in front of what promises to be an electric atmosphere in Philadelphia.”
Occasions employees author David Wharton and Occasions fellow Anthony De Leon contributed to this report.
