Think Baseball Is Boring? The Savannah Bananas Are Here to Fix That.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Natalie Kitroeff** (0:15)
From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily on Sunday.
If I were to ask you, what is the only baseball team to ever sell out 500 consecutive games? What would you say? As a hint, they also have the most social media followers of any baseball team in America. Are you thinking maybe the championship-winning Los Angeles Dodgers?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:45)
Have won the World Series!

**SPEAKER_4** (0:47)
The New York Yankees?

**Natalie Kitroeff** (0:49)
The storied Boston Red Sox? Nope. It turns out that by many metrics, the most popular baseball team in the world is a team that has never won a World Series, that has no future Hall of Famers on their roster. They don't even play professional baseball. They do sometimes dance to Miley Cyrus songs in between plays.
Welcome to the Savannah Bananas. They started out as an amateur team based out of Savannah, Georgia, but they have quickly become a sensation. Touring the country, selling out stadiums, and going viral online with a show that's a little bit baseball, walk off home run, a little bit boy band concert, and a little bit Cirque du Soleil.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:50)
Back flip catch, Robert Anthony Cruz, you're out of your mind.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:57)
Today on the show, I'm talking to my colleague and big time baseball fan, Jonathan Abrams, who's covered the Bananas, about the significance of this phenomenon. And then I get on a plane and go witness a Bananas game myself.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:13)
Wow.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:14)
Dude, that's actually crazy. All right, this guy.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (2:17)
It's Sunday, August 23rd. Jonathan Abrams, welcome back to The Daily. It's great to have you.

**Jonathan Abrams** (2:26)
Natalie, thanks so much for having me on.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (2:28)
So I love baseball. I root for the Philadelphia Phillies, which is a cursed fate and involves a lot of pain and suffering. But I get the sense that the way I love baseball is different from the way you love baseball.
So maybe you can just start by talking about why and how you love baseball.

**Jonathan Abrams** (2:53)
Yeah, baseball is a sport that's just ingrained in me, Natalie. My mom likes to tell one of her favorite stories is that she was cleaning up and I was a baby, the television was on and she turned off the television and I started crying. It took her a few minutes before she actually figured out that she had to turn the television back on because the World Series was on.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (3:15)
Wow.

**Jonathan Abrams** (3:15)
I was an infant, couldn't talk, but I was sitting there watching the baseball game. So that fandom, that love for the game, it never left me. Forty-two years old, I play in an old man baseball league. I have this big scar on my arm from foolishly diving for a foul ball a couple of weekends ago. I'm a die-hard Dodgers fan. Much, much, much earlier than when they went on this run.
Everybody complains about the Dodgers now, but I will say that before 2020, Dodgers hadn't won a World Series since 1988 So it was a long drought that has been, I would say, adequately quenched at this point.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (3:53)
No one feels bad for you, Jonathan. Okay. So baseball, I think it's fair to say, is a little bit of a religion to you.
What did you think when you first heard about the Savannah Bananas?

**SPEAKER_3** (4:08)
This is not baseball. This is not just another night at the ballpark.

**Jonathan Abrams** (4:16)
Yeah. For me, seeing it initially from the outside, the Savannah Bananas seemed like it was something that wouldn't draw the attention of anybody who truly loved baseball. All this dancing and all the skits, and it seemed like an abomination to the sport.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:32)
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Banana Ball!

**Natalie Kitroeff** (4:39)
To why did it seem like something you wanted to understand then?

**Jonathan Abrams** (4:44)
Because no matter what I thought of it, it was and is insanely popular. Guys, have you seen this team called the Savannah Bananas?

**SPEAKER_9** (4:52)
They're a small team out of Georgia that's rewritten the rules of the game.

**SPEAKER_10** (4:56)
Every single game the Bananas have played at home has been a sellout.

**Jonathan Abrams** (5:01)
I think the waitlist to get into a Savannah Bananas game is over 4 million people, which makes it, if you think about it, it's harder to get into a Savannah Bananas game than to go to a Super Bowl or to go to a Taylor Swift concert.