The Savannah Bananas are one of the most expensive sporting tickets in Salt Lake this year. What are they doing right?

It might cost you more to go to an exhibition baseball game than any other sporting event in Utah this year.

To get in to a game for the Savannah Bananas — the cross-country barnstorming team that has become a viral sensation over the last half-decade — in Salt Lake City’s Smith’s Ballpark, just to sit on the outfield grass, it’s going to cost you over $100 per person on the secondary market. For an actual seat, you may have to double it.

What’s the secret? Well, the Savannah Bananas and their co-traveling opposition, the Party Animals, just have fun while they’re playing baseball.

For one, they’ve changed the rules. Each inning won is worth a point. They’ve eliminated the time-wasting inherent in standard baseball: No new innings start after two hours. Batters aren’t allowed to step out of the batter’s box. No mound visits. No walks are allowed — if there’s a ball four, every defensive player on the field must touch the ball while the batter wildly sprints around the bases.

Oh, and in their rules (they call it Banana Ball), fans come first. Teams can challenge calls, but once per game, a fan representative can too. If a fan catches a foul ball, it counts as an out. And most of all, they simply cater every single moment of the action to be as interesting as possible to their assembled crowd.

So when you go to batting practice before the game, it’s less about hitting balls and more about practicing the events fans love during the game. It’s not that the baseball competition is scripted, like in wrestling or with the Harlem Globetrotters. In fact, the Party Animals have won almost half of the games the teams have played this year.

But there are certainly some aspects to a Bananas practice you won’t see anywhere else. Look around, and you’ll see one Bananas player practicing hitting on stilts, spraying balls to the outfield wall from six feet above the ground, while other players wear chef hats or motorcycle helmets. The teams practice dances so that when runs score — and after other various baseball successes — the whole team comes out and celebrates with choreographed abandon.

Team owner Jesse Cole is at the heart of all of this. Wearing a bright yellow suit at every Bananas event (including those practices), he gives a pep-talk to the Bananas’ traveling party of about 140 before every performance weekend. He, and the team’s choreography staff, direct players on about 15-20 various new and goofy actions at every game. At one of this weekend’s games, one of the players is going to call his dad from first base — Cole directed the player to hold the speaker of the phone up to his lapel microphone so the crowd could hear the call.

The Bananas’ philosophy is simple, Cole told Fast Company. Every decision is guided by this question: “Is it fans-first?” After every game, players spend hours signing autographs for fans, for example.

Guest stars to the action are common: Roger Clemens came to pitch at a recent game. On Friday, Cosmo the Cougar performed one of his dance routines with the rest of the Bananas, to large cheers and even larger boos from the Salt Lake City crowd.

With that quantity of new ideas comes chance after chance for online virality, with which comes millions of eyeballs. The Bananas have eight social media staffers ready to share those moments to 3 million followers on Instagram and nearly nine million on TikTok.

It’s why so many fans nationwide have heard of the Savannah Bananas, and why tickets for the Savannah Bananas’ two games — Friday and Saturday at Smith’s Ballpark — sold out nearly immediately upon release months ago. It’s also why it costs so much on the secondary market to get in now, and why the team makes so much money in revenue — over $10 million worth in 2023.

The players are all former minor-league or collegiate baseball players with a flair for the dramatic. Most say they had major-league dreams, but have found similar joy in performing for sold-out stadiums around the country. They’re less experienced in the dance performance arena, but team executives have been impressed with their willingness to learn and go along for the ride.

The best example this weekend? Outfielder Reese Alexiades. Once a player up the road for the Ogden Raptors, he became the only volunteer for an Olympics-themed skiing stunt the team planned. (They asked all of the players if any had skied before, and only Alexiades said yes — despite being a snowboarder himself.)

As a result of his willingness to help, Alexiades will dress up in full ski-race attire, and then be pulled by a rope around his waist by a tractor from the outfield to home plate on skis for his at-bats. In one rehearsal, the outfielder crashed to the dirt after hitting a bump; he got up, unfazed, and continued being pulled.

There was significant conversation about whether or not he should run the bases in ski boots, lest it damage the Bees’ infield or Alexiades’ Achilles tendons. But, as is classic for the Bananas, they decided to fully send the bit — he would run in the boots.

“I’ll tell you this, doing all this stuff and all the dancing makes the baseball part so much easier. It makes you play better when you know the baseball is easy,” Alexiades said.

I asked Alexiades: after playing for the Bananas, are other sports boring?

“When I go to a football game, I hate it because there are so many time outs and there’s so much standing around,” he said. “When I go to an event, I want there to be things going on the whole time.”

At a Bananas game, there are — and the fans love it.

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