From the moment Jesse Cole first picked up a baseball, all he wanted to do was be a Major League ball player. But after an injury in college derailed his pursuit, he was left with no other choice than to switch gears and hang up the uniform.
Years later, his dream was revived in a different way, and a new uniform came in the form of a bright yellow tuxedo as he became the ring leader and owner of the Savannah Bananas baseball team. And if you ask him, he couldn’t be happier about it.
As told in his new book, Banana Ball: The Unbelievably True Story of the Savannah Bananas, out this week by Dutton, the Scituate native has effectively turned the beloved game of baseball on its head by bringing together a burning passion for the game, a fun-loving group of ball players who feel the same, and an ever-present desire to bring an unforgettable experience to the ballpark with the “Fans First” approach he and his wife, Emily have curated since making their way to Savannah in 2016. As a result of their huge leap of faith, Cole and the Bananas have amassed a fanbase that now stretches the globe and is currently in the swing of their “Banana Ball” world tour, which Cole is already planning to bring to major league stadiums in the future. It’s also coming to Brockton’s Campanelli Stadium this summer.
Vanyaland recently had a chance to connect with Cole to talk about the new book, what it means to be able to tell such an unbelievable success story, and how it feels to watch history unfold as the “fans first” experience of Banana Ball continues to captivate baseball fans all over the world. Check it out.
Jason Greenough: Hi, Jesse! I’m so glad we could connect for this. Just starting with the reason why we’re here, you’ve got your new book, Banana Ball: The Unbelievably True Story of the Savannah Bananas, [just released]. What’s the overall vibe as this project makes its way into the world?
Jesse Cole: What’s been shocking is what we’ve seen that’s happened since my wife and I started sleeping on air mattress and selling a handful of tickets after we sold our house and started this little team in Savannah, Georgia to now seeing fans travel from all over the world to come and see this game tried to invent. It was putting ourselves in our fans’ shoes, and trying to create the most fun game of baseball and the greatest show in sports, and now all of a sudden, to see the characters and the people that have been a part of it, it’s a story about dreams coming true, and not just for myself. It’s also about these players and people who didn’t have a chance to play baseball anymore doing something they loved and finding something that they never knew they could love this much, and so we wanted to make sure we captured that when we started going out to different cities last year, and see people really blown away and coming together to have fun.
Whether it’s through your first two books, TikTok, Instagram, or the ESPN documentary, the ever-evolving story and mission of Fans First Entertainment and the Bananas has been covered in bunches, no pun intended. In what ways does this book peel back another layer to the story?
This book is a lot more personal. This one goes into my childhood and a lot of the lessons and things I learned while growing up as an only child in Massachusetts with a dad who raised me and taught me the love of baseball. It also goes into my background in creative, where people really don’t know about my theater background from college, and some of the inspirations and mentors that led me to creating something so unique and different. Where the first two books were very business-oriented, this one goes really behind the scenes and tells a full story. I’m hoping, with this story, that I can connect with people not just on business lessons. Of course, there are a lot that I share, and we put the emphasis on ideas and creation, and doing things differently, but this is more of a chance to share things I’ve never shared before publicly.
With this year’s Banana Ball world tour currently in full swing, what’s it like knowing that while this book is now out in the world and telling the full story of the Bananas, the story is still continuing to write itself with each city you visit?
I look at books a little differently. With each of the books I’ve written, I see them as chapters. This book is a very important chapter, where I’ve gone from finding my own thing in my yellow tux, to developing the core of what is Fans First, and then developing a completely new game that really lets us spread our wings throughout the country and the world. It’s exciting. Obviously, this first big chapter of ‘Banana Ball – how it launched, where it came from, and what we did with it last year is a very important chapter because the origins of anything really tells the story of how things came to be.
Every week, it’s getting bigger than we ever could have imagined. With a waitlist of over six-hundred thousand people all over the world wanting to get tickets, it’s something we never could have imagined, but I’m so glad we were able to capture the first tour and the origins to see how it all really came to be.
In addition to the excitement of the new book, you’re also bringing the Banana Ball World Tour to Brockton’s Campanelli Stadium this summer. Of course there are so many people already looking forward to it, but personally for you, how are you feeling about bringing the Banana Ball experience back home for the first time?
It’s going to be a real thrill. Unfortunately, there’s going to be about 25,000 to 30,000 people that were looking for tickets to that game that aren’t going to be able to come, but for the five thousand-plus that are able to come, it’s really special. I was a kid playing ball with Scituate High School, and I had a dream of hopefully playing professional baseball, and now I get to see what we’ve built. With the players, the cast, and the team that has such a following, being able to bring this to a bunch of people, some of which are from my childhood and who I grew up with being able to see it in person, it means a lot.
Now, being from Massachusetts, baseball fandom really is ingrained in you from an early age. Looking back on it now, where you had that vision and drive to turn that fandom into a living from the jump, even if a yellow suit wasn’t initially part of the plan, how did that sort of baseball-crazed environment then influence your approach to what you’ve done with the Bananas now?
Well, I developed a love of the game early with the Red Sox. I was fortunate to be bat boy for a game when I was five years old, I got to pitch at Fenway when I was twenty years old, and my dad and I must have gone to a hundred games when there were five dollar bleacher seats back in the day. The game was a very big part of my life, and now to be able to see that we’re getting calls from major league teams, including the Red Sox, about bringing the Bananas to these major league stadiums is something you could never imagine.
The dream was to always be a professional baseball player, which didn’t happen, but I’m doing something that is much more impactful now, where this is bringing joy to thousands and thousands of people. I wouldn’t trade anything.
With that shoulder injury you sustained in college that ultimately resulted in the detour to a different aspect of the game, is it something you look back on and think ‘it wasn’t ideal at the time, but it still worked out’?
Absolutely. It was a blessing in disguise. Everything happens for a reason, and I’ve seen that over and over again in my life, but you have a dream to play and obviously that dream changes, and with all of these lessons I’ve learned over the last fifteen years, this is exactly the path we should be taking. I had to play and be able to watch games, and see that things needed to be changed, and if I just kept playing, I would have done the same thing everyone else is doing, and now I get to take a step back and put myself into the fans’ shoes. That’s what I do every day. I learned that from Walt Disney constantly putting himself into his guest’s shoes. I’m thinking every single day, and really every minute of the day about how we can make the game better for the fans, and that’s what I should be doing right now.
As a fellow Massachusetts native who has also had a baseball obsession since I was a kid, it’s no stretch to say you’re living the dream. If you had the chance to sit down with 10 year old Jesse to tell him about what your life has become, what would be the sentiment?
I honestly don’t think too much about that, because I’m much more focused on the future than I am on the past. It’s so cliche to say that I wouldn’t change a thing, but the reality is that you learn from everything you do, so the more you do, the more you learn, so you learn to not overthink or worry about things you can’t control, and as my dad has always said “swing hard in case you hit it.” For me, it’s just about the next at-bat, where I keep swinging, keep trying things, and I would tell myself as a younger person to try and experiment, and swing hard. The more you try , the more you learn, and the more you learn and do, the more you get to experience and make an impact.
Of course, you’ve filled your yellow notebook with ideas for years, and a lot of those ideas have been enacted and played out to curate the current Bananas experience, so the core fact that you’re changing the game of baseball in real time may or may not really come as a surprise to you at this point. With that being said, has it been difficult to wrap your head around what you’ve achieved so far?
I don’t really think too much about that. I’m obsessed with creating a better fan experience and creating the greatest shows in sports, so I don’t think about the perception or what other people are thinking, or what the level of the impact is. I’m focused on getting better every day, and just like Walt Disney said about how Disney Land is a living and breathing thing, and how it will never be complete, and how they’ll continue to ‘plus the show,’ I’m obsessed with plussing the show. And bettering the experience every day.
For anyone who watched the ESPN documentary, we know the power and potential that lives inside that yellow notebook. While it may be tough to pin down exactly where the gospel of Banana Ball goes from here because it is such a richly vast and always-moving thing, it still feels like, in many ways, you’re just getting started. Where does it go from here?
The only people we work for are the fans, so we are monitoring and paying attention to what the fans want, and obviously, we see opportunities to bring this to more cities all over the country and all over the world, we see opportunities to make this a more competitive game and bring in new teams. We see that Banana Ball is a truly special game, so in terms of where it goes, we will see it in Major League Baseball stadiums, and in stadiums all over the world, and we’ll probably play in places you never would have imagined before. I think there will be more players playing it, and the game is going to grow as the game, not just the Savannah Bananas, so Banana Ball will become its own thing that I believe will be much bigger than even the Bananas are.