Building the Savannah Bananas (with Jesse Cole, Founder and Owner)

Transcript: (disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)

Ben: All right Acquired listeners, we have a very special treat with you today. We have Jesse Cole, the owner and founder of the Savannah Bananas and the creator of Banana Ball with us here today.

David: I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited for an ACQ2 episode ever.

Ben: This story is the most unlikely success story and the most fun. It is baseball. For anyone who hasn’t paid attention, a lot of you have probably you’re out there thinking, oh, Savannah Bananas, everyone knows about that. A lot of you are also thinking, wait, how have I never heard of this if Ben and David are treating it like the whole world has heard?

There are these weirdly two camps—people that think everyone knows about Banana Ball and people that this is your first experience. It’s baseball, but there’s a guy on stilts. There are choreographed dances. If a fan catches your foul ball, you’re out. If you bunt, you’re ejected. And there are 15 more rules like this.

David: It’s baseball, but fun.

Ben: But fun. The craziest thing though is how much it’s really caught fire, and that’s (I think) one of the things we’re going to talk about today. Last year they sold a million tickets. This year they’ve sold 2 million and they have an additional 3 million person waiting list. Is that right Jesse? Somewhere in that neighborhood.

Jesse: 3.2 now, but yes.

Ben: But who’s counting? The Bananas now have over 15 million followers on social media, including more TikTok followers than every MLB team combined. Tickets are $35 to games-ish. There is unlimited food and drinks, there are no hidden fees. Jesse has “built the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball,” and I think we even referred to that on our IPL Cricket episode, but it’s not, and we’re going to talk today about why it’s not that.

Anyway, we’ve got the man in the yellow tuxedo. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us.

Jesse: Truly fired up to be with you guys. As I shared in our first call, big fan, then a listener of the podcast, learned so much, and shared your podcast with many people on our team. I’m excited to be with you. Turn it around a little bit today.

David: Well we hope we can atone for calling you the Harlem Globetrotters of Baseball.

Ben: Yes.

Jesse: A lot of people call us that. It’s the easiest comparison, so I get it.

Ben: You’re a student of business history. We have so many interesting business angles to analyze the Bananas from, but I want this in narrative form. So take me back, how did Banana Ball start?

Jesse: Oh geez. Well let’s start as a 23-year-old general manager of a team in Gastonia in North Carolina, that had 200 fans coming to their games, $268 in the bank account, and was losing $150,000 a year. That was my first job.

David: And this wasn’t even the minor leagues. This was a college summer league, correct?

Jesse: Yeah, there’s major league, AAA, AA, high A, regular A, rookie ball, independent ball, and then there’s college summer baseball way down there. We were one of the lowest levels of baseball, and the team was there and failing. The only way you get a job as a general manager at 23, it has to be one of the worst teams in the country, and that’s how I got the gig. We had to turn it around.

I started meeting with everyone. I got hung up on numerous phone calls. People weren’t interested in working with us. I realized that we couldn’t be a baseball team. We had to make it more about entertainment, because we were never going to have the best baseball players.

That’s when I just started reading every book about PT Barnum, Walt Disney, Cirque du Soleil, SNL, WWE, I just said, let’s get crazy. We started doing grandma beauty pageants, flatulence fun nights, salute to underwear nights, dig to China night where we actually buried a certificate to China in the infield dirt, and after the game we had everyone dig to China.

David: Like an actual trip to China?

Jesse: Yeah, but it was just a one-way flight to China. No flight back and no accommodations.

David: Oh my god.

Jesse: We fired our mascot for bear growth hormone (BGH) when (remember) HGH was really big, so we did that. We offered George Bush after his term was over an internship with us. We were going to give him a host family, a stipend. So we just started doing everything to create attention.

David: In this era, you were doing crazier but typical minor league baseball stuff. You were still just playing baseball but doing stunts, right?

Jesse: It was traditional baseball which had to get people excited about it. Really what people don’t realize, it was 10 years there of experimenting with the pregnant nights and you name it. We did everything.

That’s when people started to say, I’m coming to the show. I’m coming to have fun. That was the first time we had players dance. I actually had players learn how to dance during the game. So we started really experimenting for 10 years there with very little notice.

Now, we climbed out to be fourth in the country in attendance. We started selling out games, but it was in a little tiny suburb of Charlotte. I think we had one media story in my 10 years. That was it. But the team was profitable, it was successful, it was doing very well.

Ben: What was the team called?

Jesse: The Gastonia Grizzlies. Now they no longer exist. I guess they didn’t do as well as I hoped, but we did a good job with them. They ended up getting sold, and now they got a professional team in Gastonia. It actually helped steer the way to building a whole new stadium in professional baseball, but the actual college summer team no longer exists.

Ben: And you had a background as a player. You were a pitcher?

Jesse: Yeah, I played. I played division one college ball. I was getting seen by professional scouts. I thought that was my dream and that’s where I was going to go. Before I went to Gastonia, I went into coaching. You don’t play, you go coach. But I realized there I was coaching in the Cape Cod League, which you guys may know is probably one of the best—

David: That’s kind of the premier college summer league, right?

Jesse: Correct. I was sitting there literally next to the best players in the world in the dugout with the best seat in the house, and I was bored out of my mind. There’s a difference when you’re playing the game versus when you’re watching the game. I was like, I know we’re going to hit and run here. This hitter’s coming up. We’re going to bring in this guy. I’m still bored. I can’t imagine the fans that don’t love baseball, how they’re feeling.

That was the little start to all of that. I studied Walt Disney probably more than anyone. He was at Griffith Park watching his two daughters. Saturday was daddy day with Walt and he went to the carousel at Griffith Park. He said, man, I wish there was a place adults and kids could have fun together.

That was where the idea of Disneyland started. I remember vividly being in that dugout and just saying, I wish the game was fun for everyone and not just people who were playing the game. And that’s where it started. Gastonia was 10 years of experimenting before the colossal failure, and the beginning of the Savannah Bananas.

Ben: Have you always had this personality type? Most people would observe, this isn’t that fun but hey, this is the industry I’m in, this is the game I’m in, this is the sport. Most people would never plant a ticket in the infield and say, you know? Let’s do a dig to China.

Jesse: I wanted to be successful, I wanted to figure out how to make it work. I wanted to put my name on something and create something special.

I started in 2007–2008. That was the peak of Major League Baseball. Eighty million fans were going to baseball, like Major League Baseball games. Now, it’s around 70 million, I think, but it was dominating. I still saw something because I played the game, and I was watching. It was just wasn’t that exciting. The games got to be over three hours long. That’s a long game.

I was sitting there. I was like, God, I can’t wait till this game’s over, and I’m coaching the team. If you’re coaching the team and on the dugout, you can’t wait till the game’s over, there’s got to be a fundamental problem. And that was the start of let’s make something fun, let’s try something, let’s experiment.

Ben: And Gastonia, you’re employed.

Jesse: I didn’t get paid the first few months, yes. But I eventually got paid, yes.

Ben: Somebody else owned the team, and they employed you as the GM?

Jesse: I was employed as the GM. I became the managing partner, got a piece of ownership, and then ended up buying that team after 10 years. But yes, it was 10 years of a slow build, from losing hundreds of thousand dollars to making a little bit of money.

Ben: How does it work to buy that team? Was that a risk for you financially?

Jesse: You know what’s so funny? The team was worth probably nothing when I started, which was crazy. The owner who I’m so close with, actually ended up marrying my wife and I at our field in Gastonia. That’s how full circle it is.

But I joke because I had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for this team that was worth nothing when we started. But because we made it to one of the high, I was like, I hurt myself colossally there. Now, we made a good deal, owner financing. He helped me get started and I took it over. I think 2014 is when I bought that.

Ben: How does that lead to the Savannah Bananas?

Jesse: Long story short, the last game of 2014 (August 4th, 2014), I had met my—she was my girlfriend at the time—Director of Fun, Emily McDonald. Now, how did I meet her? I was hosting a seminar our first year and she was working for Cal Ripken in Ripken Baseball, working for the Augusta Greenjackets. She was in minor league baseball and I hosted a seminar.

This is how crazy, I’m 24 years old and I’m like, I’m going to host a seminar. I only hosted it because I wanted to learn. I was like, can I get everyone here from minor league baseball, pay nothing, just come, we’ll do a seminar. Luckily, I got some people to come, and I’m talking about our grandma beauty pageants.

Her boss left the conference, called her and said, I just met the guy you’re going to marry. Emily’s like, what are you talking about Amy? She’s like, no. He’s got the energy, the enthusiasm, the passion. He’s all in it like you are. Just reach out to him, ask some business questions, and maybe you guys can connect.

She reached out, I told her about our grandma beauty pageants and our craziness, and we just stayed in touch. Then we met again at a minor league promo seminar, hit it off. She came to work for us. We didn’t tell anybody. Literally, she wanted to build herself in the industry. We had to keep it secret.

For a whole year, she’s literally our Director of Fun. We are the most professional relationship, no anything. She’s working. She joins every board like the YMCA, the United Way. She’s a part of everything in the community, builds herself up. Then after a year, we tell people.

I think a year later on the last game of the year, I met her at our stadium in Gastonia, the first time I met her in person in front of a sold out crowd. I stopped the game in the middle of the sixth inning and I’m thanking all of our players, all of our cast, all of our staff. I say last but not least.

I went into her and I told, we met here at this field. This is the first time in front of my family, your family, our entire baseball family. Will you make me the luckiest guy in the world? Dropped down to a knee, had the ring inside of baseball, had fireworks go off in the middle of the game. just to delay the game completely, 20 minutes.

This is our moment. The umpires are like, are we going to play soon? I’m like, just let us own this moment. Thank goodness, she said yes. That night, she was just so excited. I went to sleep after the game. She planned a trip to Savannah. She’s like, you did this epic proposal. I want to plan a weekend for us to have fun.

So we went down to Savannah, and we got to check out the minor league stadium. We never been there. She’s like, yeah—

David: Just like, oh, it’s a beautiful place. Beautiful place to go.

Jesse: A weekend together. That was it. Nothing. But I was like, Em, we got to check out this stadium. She’s like, all right.

We went to the minor league stadium and I’ll never forget. We walk in. You could feel the history. It was 1926 ballpark. Babe Ruth played there, Hank Aaron played there, Jackie Robinson played there. It was amazing. We walk in, it’s a beautiful night, 80 degrees, and there’s nobody there. I mean 200 people max.

You can almost picture a tumbleweed just going through the grandstand, like what is going on? I immediately called the commissioner of our league and I said, if this minor league team, New York Mets affiliate ever leaves, we’re calling this market. He is like, sure, Jesse. Whatever you say. It’s a minor league market.

A month later they say, we want a brand new stadium, $38 million, or we’re leaving. The city’s like, we’re not building you a $38 million stadium. They’re like, peace out. We’re gone. I’m like—

Ben: Where’d they go to?

Jesse: Columbia, South Carolina. They left, and we then convinced the city of Savannah to give a lease to us to start a college summer team. They had minor league baseball for 90 years, and we convinced them to let us have a college summer team at this old, majestic stadium. That’s when it got really, really hard, but that’s how it started.

Ben: I was reading, that’s a $20,000 per year lease that you signed. Is that right?

Jesse: Yes, and that was just what we had in Gastonia. Again, I’ve learned, if you have a good precedent, share it. If you have a very good precedent, share it. I was $20,000 a year. This is what we pay. We’re just a small little college summer team, please help us. They worked with us and shared it. So they said yes and we convinced them, but that’s when it got really hard.

David: Emily said yes. They said yes.

Jesse: Everybody’s saying yes at this point except for the fans. The fans all said no immediately.

David: I got to stop you for one minute, actually. I can’t remember we talked about this before. You’re just bringing back so many memories of my childhood.

My family’s in the baseball business. My dad was one of the founders of the Atlantic League, which is one of the big independent minor leagues. My whole childhood was going around with my dad to these cities that either had minor league baseball teams in the past, the team had left, or great cities where they were in the territory of a major league team so couldn’t have a minor league team. We would go pitch these municipalities exactly like you were doing.

Jesse: Yeah, we pitched them, they said yes. Then we showed up and the former team cut the phone lines, they cut the Internet lines, they took everything out of the ballpark. There was nothing left.

We walk in, it’s myself, my wife. I’m 31 at the time, Emily’s 28. Our team president is 24 years old, and we have three 22-year-olds straight out of college who are interns. This is our crew. We’re like, we’re going to take this on. We have this big vision. I was like, if we could start from scratch, if we could make the team any way we want to, all inclusive tickets, nonstop entertainment, we were ready.

Then we proceeded to sell two tickets in the first three months. A guy gave us a donation. It was like, here you go. We had a launch event where we gave out free food, free alcohol. We were going onto doors and knocking, literally knocking at restaurants, knocking at shops. They were like, we’re not interested. About 100 people showed up for a free event and the conference center felt so bad they didn’t even charge us for all the food and all the alcohol. It was so bad, guys, on how we started.

David: And the fans were pissed that they’d lost their official minor league team. They’re like, oh this is some college thing coming in.

Jesse: We got college summer baseball and we had professional baseball. This is the lowest of low. Why would we support this? We’re not interested. We heard it everywhere.

Ben: Help me understand. Did you still own the grizzlies at this point?

Jesse: Yes, I had both teams. At that point, I was living in Gastonia and just coming back and forth to Savannah. But we were failing so bad that on January 15th, 2016 we got the phone call that we’d overdrafted our counter. We were completely out of money for the Bananas.

We launched on October 4th or October 5th, 2015. Within three months, we sold a handful of tickets. By January we were completely out of money. Emily turned to me and said, Jesse, we have to sell our house. We have no other options. So we sold our house up in Gastonia, we emptied our savings account, we found a dump down in Savannah. It was an old garage, guys. It was a garage turned into a studio.

Ben: Wait, you could have just said, hey, the Savannah team’s not working out. I own and have a reasonably decent team over with the Grizzlies. Let’s just cut our losses. But instead you sell your house?

Jesse: The Gastonia team was successful. Now, it wasn’t like there wasn’t cash flow like crazy. And it’s a college summer team. You play 30 games, the money comes in during the summer. That time, there was no money anywhere. We’re just like, we don’t have money at all.

We got all these people who were responsible for the six people in Savannah, then we have our people in Gastonia. Our option was sell our house. We sold our house, empty our savings account, found a dump. Emily went and got a twin airbed. Not even a queen or a king airbed. She got a twin airbed.

This is how gross this place is, guys. We had to sleep in our socks. You never sleep in your socks. That is crazy talk. It was disgusting. There were cockroaches, it was gross.

We were reading at the time a book by Mike Michalowicz, Profit First. There was a chapter in there about saving. You need to enjoy saving more than spending. It’s just one more day, one more day. We had phone chargers that were falling apart, and we just kept saying one more day, one more day. We’d grocery shop with just $30 for a whole week. We’d go into Walmart with a $20 bill and a $10 bill. We’d have 42 meals for a week, and that’s what we were doing for months because we couldn’t sell anything. People hadn’t experienced us. We were just a college summer team.

Ben: Wow. Okay, the state of play 2016.

David: Were you already studying P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney at this point in time? Sid you have the vision?

Jesse: Yes. Oh, I was reading everything on them. I just knew we had to get [...] to experience it. Walt literally went bankrupt with Laugh-O-Grams. He had his struggles. P.T. Barnum, everyone had their struggles. It was just, no one had experienced our product in Savannah. We were just this.

Marketing is not what you say. Marketing is what you do. You have to create an experience that is remarkable. We hadn’t done that. That’s where we had to take a page out of P.T. Barnum’s book and said, how are we going to create attention? We need to name the team something completely different and wild to get attention because right now, nothing’s working. I can tell them about what we’re doing but no one cares.

Ben: What was the temporary name that you were using when you were marketing to the community?

Jesse: Savannah Baseball 2016. There was no name like…

Ben: So the Washington Football Club.

David: Real ring to it.

Jesse: The year before when I started our company, it was like Team Cole and Associates, like a terrible law firm or accounting office. Eventually, when we came to Savannah, we changed it to Fans First Entertainment, because that’s our mission—fans first. Everything we do is fans first.

Fans First became our guiding light, our North Star. But fans hadn’t experienced what we’ve done. We were like, okay, we got to name the team. We do a name-the-team contest. We get a thousand generic suggestions—Spirits, Ports, Anchors. Everyone’s like, you got to be the Braves. I’m like, there’s a Braves team in Georgia. We’re not going to be the Braves. It’s not going to happen, guys.

Then one suggestion, a 62-year-old nurse, Lynn Moses, suggested Bananas.

David: Had you already been thinking Bananas? Had it crossed your mind?

Jesse: It had been thrown around, we thought about it, but we’re like, well anybody suggest it? And then she suggested it. We looked and we had yes. A senior citizen dance team, the Banana Nanas. A male cheerleading team, the Man-Nanas. A mascot named Split. Go, Bananas. Bananas in the pants that people catch it during promotions. Can’t stop the peeling. We started thinking of everything and I was like, this is crazy enough. It could work.

This was actually interesting. I haven’t told many people about this. We had to get a logo designer. We had no money. So everybody suggest work with someone local and do the logo. Anyone on our team, my wife, our president, everyone was like, Jesse, we don’t have the money. I’m like, guys, we have to get the logo right. This is important or it’s not going to work. I’m like, we don’t have money.

There was one group, Studio Simon, that does really good food animated logos. I went to him and he was like, it’s $12,000. I’m like, we don’t have that anywhere.

Ben: We don’t have $1000.

Jesse: I have $30 to grocery shop, guys. We won’t eat this week. We’ll figure it out. I told him the vision and I negotiated him down. It was still high figure. Our team was like, Jesse, we can’t. I’m like, guys, we have to. This is it. We just have to. We put everything into this logo that we had.

The first time he showed it to me, I was like, yes. This is it, guys. Excuse my language, but I said I want a badass banana. This can’t be a soft banana. I need a badass banana. Tropical, fun colors. It needs to work. And he delivered.

I knew when we had that, I was like, people are going to criticize us like crazy for the name. You can’t criticize this logo. This logo is good. I was like, you can’t criticize it. I was right. We named the team. We had a big event February 25th, 2016.

Ben: I just have to stop listeners. To have Jesse say, I haven’t told this story before or I haven’t told this story to many people, there’s an ESPN show about the Bananas. They were just on 60 Minutes.

David: You’re on Disney+.

Ben: You have told the story. This is a rare privilege for us to get to talk to you in a format like this. Jesse, I have to tell you. This morning, I went to my local Starbucks. As I am ducking out, I see someone wearing a Bananas hat. I was just like, this is too perfect.

Jesse: I love it. It’s the power of the banana man. Walt Disney said it all started with a mouse. It all started because of a mouse. And it’s crazy. We were on an airbed, grocery shopping with $30. But when we named the team Bananas on February 25th, 2016, everything started to change.

Now at first, terribly. The criticism we received for naming the team Bananas. I’ll give you an example. That night, the owner should be thrown out of town. Whoever came with the name should be fired. You’re an embarrassment to the city. You’ll never sell a ticket.

They had the big St. Patrick’s Day parade in Savannah. Now this is hundreds of thousands of people come. It’s like one of the biggest in the country. We proudly—myself and our staff, that was it—wore our t-shirts down to the parade. We were getting booed everywhere we walked. Imagine walking down the street. I’m 31, my wife’s 28, we got 22-year-olds. We were just getting booed for what we’re wearing. I was like, this is brutal.

David: My mental image of Savannah is this beautiful, old school, southern, very tradition-steeped community. And here you are, you took their beloved baseball team where Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron played there, and we’re making this the Bananas.

Jesse: We made it a joke. It was like, this has to be a joke. We made it a joke. Everyone’s like, doesn’t even make sense. Bananas. Some people said no, we’re one of the biggest ports of bananas. I’m like, yup, 100%. Not at all. That is not true. It sounded awesome.

We had an amazing idea to build this into a fun brand with all the different things. The Banana Baby that we lift up before the game with a baby in a banana costume and sing, nah, Sylvania, all these ideas that we wanted to put into our show.

But they had a reason. They had a reason to criticize. We hadn’t earned anything. We hadn’t done anything. We were just talk. We had a big vision and to make it fun, but they had to experience it.

We were criticized, we’re ripped apart. But now people started to like, maybe I should buy tickets. Maybe I should see what they’re all about. Maybe I should listen. We created a sellout mentality.

People don’t know this, either. Geez, I shared this internal. Sorry, guys. I’m getting into it a little.

David: Great.

Ben: It’s great.

Jesse: We had 28 games on the schedule. We condensed it to 22 and made double headers so we could create some more demand and excitement, because no one wants to come to a Monday or Wednesday game. We said let’s create double headers on Wednesday, so we have six less games and a bigger chance of selling out more games. That was the first thing we did. Then we said, what if we build five game plans. but we only sell $250? Then we announced those are sold out.

Ben: But you don’t control the league. You’re working with the league to do some wonky scheduling and have them just roll with your ideas.

Jesse: Luckily with 10 years in Gastonia, we’ve built some success. They started to give me a little bit more opportunity. I said, hey, we need this to work, guys. This is a big win.

I actually bought the team from the league, so I owed them money every single year, hundreds of thousands of dollars. They needed this to win. That’s some of the inside game as well. They were like, we’ll work with you. We know there’s creating some excitement and energy.

When we announced the team, ESPN SportsCenter put on, it said logo of the year? With the Bananas. We were on SportsCenter for 15 minutes, which is like, oh. For us a college summer team, that’s as big as it gets. We were like, game over, guys. We did it. We did it.

Ben: Haven’t played a game yet, but it’s over. We won.

Jesse: Yes, and then we walked around town and got booed. It was really up and down between how we were feeling in the first weeks, but we convinced enough people to come out. We pushed all the tickets to opening night. We’re like, we’re going to get everybody to come to opening night, create this unbelievable thing, and go all in.

David: You knew you needed a great show opening night.

Jesse: 100%. That’s why we had our Banana Nanas. We had them ready to go. We had the Banana Baby. We had a breakdancing coach. We went all in. We had the first banana instead of the first pitch. You throw a banana. We were thinking about it. Then the team was wearing green uniforms because we weren’t quite ripe. We literally went all out.

David: This is a new team, this is all college players. Anybody who watches the Bananas now, these are incredible entertainers. I assume you didn’t have any of that. These guys didn’t know how to dance. They were just college summer baseball players.

Ben: But they’re good baseball players.

Jesse: Yes, but we had to convince them to play for a team called the Bananas. The recruiting was harder than it ever was. Literally when they showed up, we spent a day-and-a-half teaching and coaching them. When they get criticism, how does it feel playing for a team named after a fruit? We had to coach them, media training, and say like, hey, do you hate the name too? It’s like guys, no we don’t say we hate the name. We’re excited to have fun. We tried to teach them to embrace it.

Our first practice we filmed, they did it with just bananas. We did batting practice with bananas, we did throwing with bananas, we did catching with bananas. We fully embraced it and just made it fun.

Ben: And are they worried about destroying their reputation? They’re trying to get recruited by major league teams, and are they worried about the perception of being part of a joke?

Jesse: Maybe, but it’s college summer ball.

David: Anything goes in the college summer ball.

Jesse: They’re all playing at these top level colleges, and somehow we actually got good players. But that first night, we made six errors.

We’re playing in green uniforms because we’re not quite ripe and we made six errors. But a few crazy things happened. We had a rain delay. The first thing I said is it’s a graining, and everyone’s there just getting poured on. I said, nanas, just go out and dance. They went out on the field and dance. They were wearing white jerseys, it’s pouring rain, and it’s Banana Nanas. Talk about another viral moment that was unintentional.

David: The Nanas being the grandma dance team.

Jesse: The Banana Nanas, our senior citizen dance team is dancing in white jerseys as it’s raining on them during the rain delay. Ridiculous. We had the first night all-you-can-eat. Again, that was part of our fans’ first model that you briefly mentioned before.

We made every single ticket all-inclusive. All your burgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda water, popcorn, dessert, everything inclusive. It was $15 when we started, but we had no idea what we were doing.

We went through 10,000 pieces of meat in the first hour. It was a disaster. People were waiting 2–3 hours. We ended up going through with every other type of food we had because people couldn’t get it.

Ben: I assume you lost money because people did all-they-can-eat more than…

Jesse: Yes and no. People don’t realize you can’t eat that many burgers and hot dogs. Even if a burger are really high quality burgers $1 or $2, sodas are 20¢–30¢, good hot dogs 80¢, we’d always act like, yeah, we’re losing our shirt on this.

Theoretically you’re not, really, but you want to make a product that people feel like they can take advantage of you. I love the idea of making a product that people get so excited, I’m going to take advantage of them, I’m going to get them. I’m like, yes, you go get it, man. You go get it. It’s just that mindset.

But they watched the players go into the crowd and deliver roses to little girls. They watch the dancing, they watch the entertainment. After that night, they started telling people, we’ve never seen anything like this.

That changed everything. They had to experience it first. That was the start playing traditional baseball at that point. But fans were coming in now and we were starting to sell out game after game after game.

Ben: So it worked out of the gate.

David: Well it didn’t work until the first gate and then the first gate it worked.

Ben: Is it right to say you had product/market fit with fans from your first game on?

Jesse: Yes. As soon as they experienced it, yes. I would say right out of the gate, the airbed and the grocery shop, yes, there was not, but after 6–9 months, once they started seeing, they were like, this is something different. This is good for Savannah. Savannah’s a fun city. People want to have fun. It worked out.

Ben: What’s your debt load personally look like at this snapshot in history?

Jesse: Oh geez, I’m over seven figures in debt. It was tough.

Ben: Because you owed money to the league,

Jesse: Owed money to the league, owed money to start up. We had to get a place to live. It was a lot of things. Money to put in, money to start, owing money for the league. Then I actually still owed Ken Silver, the owner of Gastonia. I still had that team. It was a pile of piles of debt.

Ben: This must be a pretty wild thing that you’re sitting on owing all these payments to all these different parties, and you have a thing that’s really working, but it’s not like super cash generative, even though it has great product/market fit.

Jesse: What was happening, merchandise was bigger than we ever imagined. Even when we were first launched on February 25th, we did merchandise from all 50 states in different countries, immediately. Now SportsCenter, we were at national. It was Yahoo’s front page, which Yahoo was a big thing back then. We were everywhere.

Merchandise was selling and it was crazy, nationally. The brand was loved. Locally, it was not loved, which to be honest, it’s still a thing, national, local. There are all these different mindsets of us as we’ve grown and as we’ve developed into what we are. But yeah, merchandise was bigger than we ever imagined. Our biggest day in Gastonia ever, we were doing that in hours. It wasn’t even a comparison what the Bananas were doing in merchandise.

Ben: You’ve created almost a lifestyle brand. If I wear the Savannah Bananas logo, it says more about me than it does about me liking baseball.

Jesse: That’s a good point. We have people come up to us every day and they say, whenever they want to feel good about themself, they wear our shirt. People will come up to them and say, I love your shirt. Go, Bananas. Have you seen them? It creates conversation.

Even today, every time people wear our shirts are now the Party Animals, and our other brands are happening that. Yeah, I think a lifestyle brand was an accidental thing that happened.

David: I want to spend one more minute on business model here. I remember from my youth and my family, there are four main revenue lines for minor league baseball. There are tickets, there’s merchandise, then there’s food and bev, and advertising. Even in those early days, and I think certainly now you basically cut off the last two. No advertising, no sponsorship, and food and bev is included.

Jesse: Yeah, tickets and food and bev came together. Now again, there was auxiliary. There was alcohol and some specialty items, ice cream and other. All the ballpark basics were included. So there was a little bit of food and bev, but basically that covered your cost. Then sponsorship, we had in the first few years, but it wasn’t much. Our first few years it was probably 15%–20% of our total business.

David: And then you ultimately cut it all off, right?

Jesse: Yeah. We thought two weeks before a global pandemic, might as well eliminate another big source of revenue for the team. It was February 25th, 2020 that we made an announcement that we don’t believe anybody comes to a ballpark to be sold to, marketed to, or advertised to, and we want to give this historic ballpark back to the fans. We’re creating an ad-free stadium here in Savannah.

We eliminated all the ads, and right there, hundreds of thousands of dollars we just threw away. We actually created a fan wall. Instead of ads, fans get to sign the wall and put their name on the wall, so where there’s zero revenue. But what we wanted to do was that we work for one person and it’s the fan. That’s who we work for.

A lot of times when you have sponsors and advertisers, they try to extract value from fans. We want to give value to fans with everything we do. What do we believe we can be the best in the world at? It’s putting on the greatest show in sports. It’s not selling ads.

Three, four, five years ago, everyone started to go into digital. If you’re an advertiser, do you want to put an ad at a stadium? Is that the best use of your $10,000–$20,000 or whatever? So we just started to put ourselves in our fan shoes in every way, and we just said, no. We’re going to lean in all in on that. So yes, tickets and merchandise, that is 95% of our entire business model.

Ben: I’m going to foreshadow something we’ll get to later in the episode around ticketing, but when we were chatting before this, you have this principle that shows up in a lot of different mechanics in your business, which is no one is allowed to sit in between us and our fans and no one is allowed to extract value out of that relationship. It is a pure product that we make for them that they pay for. You’re more obsessed with that than any entrepreneur I’ve ever.

Jesse: Well, go back to Walt Disney. Control the end-to-end experience. He learned that with his final masterpiece. Magic Kingdom. He even built his own government inside the Reedy Creek District inside Disney World, so he could control getting permits, putting off fireworks, doing all the voting. That’s what he learned.

When he built Disneyland, it was only 190 acres or so. Literally it became (he called it) the neon jungle. Everyone just moved around, all these hotels. He had to build a wall to keep it out so he could control the experience. He learned that every step of the way.

I was like, well how do we do that? If you want to create a truly great experience, you have to do it end-to-end. We’re still struggling with that when we go to other stadiums. That’s how I eventually, and when we build a potential Banana land, we would control every end-to-end experience.

David: I keep thinking about how this business model is going to apply to other stadiums.

Ben: Pivotal moment that we haven’t talked about yet. At some point, you stopped playing college summer league baseball and started playing Banana Ball. When was that? How did that happen? What did it look like mechanically?

Jesse: We literally put ourselves in our fans’ shoes. People don’t realize we go undercover. We walk up with the fans, we drive park with the fans, we sit with the fans, we eat with the fans. After every game we talk about what are the friction points of the experience. We believe that’s a starting point of all innovation. To create a fan for life is to eliminate all the friction.

We were doing this. I have videos of myself coming in hack glasses, walking in, and experiencing it. What I realized was people started to get my voice. I had to be strategic on when I talked and when I didn’t talk. But we noticed that. I started watching.

Guys, we have a promotion every half inning. Promotion like a crazy skit, you name it. It’s wild. People were still leaving games early. What I started to realize that it’s a fundamental problem with the game.

I think about New York City hotdog stand. You got the great condiments, you got the sauerkraut, you got the mustard, you got all the good stuff. That’s all our entertainment, but the hotdog still needs work. And that’s baseball. When I started watching this, I was like, there’s a challenge here. Around nine o’clock, fans would start leaving games. Nine, 15 more.

Ben: You were monitoring security camera footage to try to figure out when do people start leaving.

Jesse: We had people on our team every 30 minutes, they would take a picture and a video of the corner of the grandstands. Every 30 minutes. This was a whole year of doing this. That night he would send me the visuals and the pictures, and we have that. Then we started tracking on when they’re leaving.

You could see, literally at nine o’clock, you would watch just a rush of people get up. It was like, they just knew nine o’clock we’re good. I’m watching this over and over again. I’m like, we’re putting every form of entertainment possible. We’re winning championships, too. We’re winning games, entertainment, there is a problem.

Then I just went to the mindset, we look at everything. Whatever’s normal, do the exact opposite. If we were to put ourselves in our fan shoes, what are all the boring parts of a baseball game? What are all the things that we could change to make it so exciting, so fun that every night, regardless of the entertainment, people want to watch the game.

I started an idea book in 2016–2017. Write down 10 ideas every day. Guys, that’s a lot of bad ideas. I’m talking about 70%–80% bad ideas.

David: You were writing down 10 ideas every day, starting in 2016.

Jesse: Yeah. I believe you got to work your idea muscle. If you want to have great ideas, you got to work your idea muscle. What I realized is people that work out, they work out every day and they get their reps in. It gets really hard at 6, 7, 8, 9, but that’s how they push through. That’s how they grow, that’s how they develop. The same thing with ideas.

I just said, we got to start writing down ideas. I still do it to this day. What I realized is from the idea book, I was like, let’s think about baseball. What are the boring rules of baseball? What are the boring parts of baseball? So start writing down. Mound visits. Not one fan gets excited about a mound visit. There’s not one fan that’s like, oh, I can’t wait there. I need more mound visits.

Ben: Wonder what they’re talking about out there?

Jesse: Oh yeah, I can’t wait. Oh, seventh inning, we’re going to get some more mound visits now. It’s that time. It just doesn’t happen.

I watched the game. I’ll never forget it was the Dodgers were playing, Yasiel Puig. Remember he was a superstar for a flash in the pan. I watched he’d get in the box and then he’d step out. I was like, whoa, that was a lot of time. Then I grabbed my phone and I started timing it. It was 25–35 seconds every time he stepped out.

He had a six pitch of bat. Three minutes of via bat, he wasn’t even in the batter’s box. I go, there’s not one fan in the world that likes watching guys step out of the box. Eliminate that. I just kept looking. I said, walks.

Ben: You’re out if you step out, right? That’s the Banana Ball rule?

Jesse: It’s a strike. If you step out, it’s a strike. Then I started thinking. I was like walks. I go, there’s a rule or a play in sports. It’s actually called a walk, which is so unathletic. It’s called the walk. What is wrong with us? So I was like, well what’s the opposite of a walk? A sprint? I started thinking, how can we create a sprint action? What can we do? You punish the pitcher, you create this.

That’s where we developed the ball for sprint. On the ball four, literally the catcher has to throw the ball to every person in the field before it’s live, and the hitter can get as many bases as he wants. That was turning into a double, a triple. Now the defense is ridiculous, so it’s hard now, but you’ll see it once a game. Usually someone get a double out of it.

That’s where it started. Then fans first, our guiding light on everything. No ticket fees, no convenient fees, no service fees, no sponsorship. Then we just kept thinking like, well what’s a fan’s first rule? Well, let’s fans play the game. Let’s have them be a part of the game. So if a fan catches a foul ball, it’s an out.

The way I learned to do this is always picture what the perfect scenario is. What would be the perfect scenario is? A fan catch a foul ball to win the game. Then he’s rushed on the field. He or she’s doing the media interviews. That’s what I pictured.

So he said, if that were to happen, would it be amazing? And we said yeah. Lo and behold, two years ago, a 15-year-old kid caught a line drive in front of his sister’s head, caught it. We rushed him on the field. He’s running up and down. He’s on the front page of the paper the next day. I was like, it happened. We did it.

It’s all those little things. But then also the time, a two hour time limit. Everyone was telling me, Jesse, you got to do 2½. Games were 3 hours and 12 minutes in Major League Baseball. Go to 2½ and I’ll make a… I go no, two. You want people to want more. You don’t go to a movie in the middle of the movie and say, that was a great movie. I left in the middle.

David: Also, this is a family thing. People are bringing their kids. You don’t want your kids up till 10 o’clock. That’s miserable. You got to get them home, you got to get them to bed.

Jesse: 100%. I want people to want more and not a great comedian or anything. You’re not going to like, oh it was awesome. I just want to get out early, though. You don’t do that. But baseball games, it happens all the time.

Then the last thing I said, well what’s really bad on a game that people don’t want to come to? It’s a blowout. If team’s up by 8 runs, 10 runs, they’re not going to play. I said, well how do you change the scoring?

This is where my dad came into play. Me and my dad were as close as it could be. We talk all the time. I said, dad, what could we do with scoring? And he started, he’s a big golfer. He’s like, well what about match play or something? What if we did something, and then we start talking.

We both, what about every inning? What if every inning counts for a point? Even if a team score seven runs, they can only get one point. It’ll never ever be a blowout because you can only get one point in an inning.

Ben: It keeps the game more competitive.

Jesse: 100%. But the challenge was the first year, a team could have four points in the seventh inning and the game was over, because you win the eighth and the ninth, you could only get two more points.

Ben: You need a comeback mechanic.

Jesse: I was writing and writing and writing and writing, and I called our coaches. I go, I got it. They go, what? I go, the last inning. Every run counts as a point. So no matter what, the last inning, the ninth inning, if you score three or four runs, you can still come back and win, and it always comes down to the last inning. Every game in Banana Ball always comes down to the last inning at being close.

Ben: So you destroy the blowout problem without eliminating the comeback mechanic that naturally exists in baseball.

Jesse: Correct, and then we threw in one more final one on there. We said, well what about getting your best hitter the opportunity to hit in the ninth inning, no matter what?

Ben: Oh the golden batter.

Jesse: The golden batter rule. Your best hitter against your best pitcher, that’s action. How do you make it the ninth inning? Again, you talk about TV. A lot of your podcasts, you talk about the TV rights, how big it is. That’s a whole nother story I wear it on YouTube. But how do you get people to want to watch to the end?

Now you have the ninth inning coming down to everything, a fan can catch a foul ball to win a game, you have a golden batter who can come up, and the fans can even challenge a play. Literally, we have a fan challenge rule. If the fans don’t like a call, they can literally challenge the rule.

We built this and with 11 rules. Again, 11’s a big number for us. The 11th letter of the alphabet is K, the symbol of potassium. We have 11 rules in Banana Ball, we have 11 fans, first principles. We count down from 11 every game. Eleven’s really big to us. There’s a little symbol there as well. So there you go.

Ben: Taylor Swift has 13, Banana Ball has 11.

Jesse: There you go. It all started because of a banana.

Ben: Okay, so you have this idea that baseball can be more fun and that the Bananas should play a variant of baseball. What does it look like to leave a league and you need someone to play?

David: And then tell your fan base you thought we were wacky before?

Jesse: Well, people don’t realize is we tested this in 2018. We didn’t leave the league until 2022. In 2018 we went to a small division two college. Well, first we went to Wofford my school because my coach was like, yeah Jesse, we’ll give it a shot in practice. Then we got rained out. People say rain out is good luck (I guess). Our first ever Banana Ball game got rained out.

Then I went to Lander because one of my other assistant coaches was there. He is like, Jesse, we’ll give it a shot. We told the guys we didn’t have a name for the game yet. We were calling it speed ball or show ball. We were messing around. We played the game with them.

There was behind closed doors, except some of the girlfriends were there watching and doing homework. This was great because we played 9 innings in 99 minutes. The girlfriends were up on the edge of their seat watching instead of doing their homework. They’re like, we’ve never watched practice or scrimmage. We just come here to be outside and do our homework.

We played 9 innings, 99 minutes. The guy said it was the most fun they’ve ever had playing baseball. That was in 2018 with college guys Lander. It wasn’t until 2020 we played one in front of fans.

David: So you were work shopping for two years?

Jesse: Work shopping, playing regular conventional baseball. Then we did it 2020, again COVID year. In Georgia, we had a thousand people and they watched it. The first play or the second play was a ball force, sprint home run. No one knew what to do. It was just chaos. It was fast. It was an hour and 45, an hour and 50, it was exciting, and we’re like, there’s something here. Test it again.

Then 2021 we’re like, let’s just keep the Coastal Plain League team, the college summer team, but let’s just do a one city world tour. I always believe in start small, but think big. Start small, think big.

We announced the one city world tour. Now again, here’s a little inside the business. Again goes back to demand, and that’s part of our flywheel. We got live events, drives content, content drives traffic, traffic drives demand, demand forces you to do more live events. That all goes together. If you push on the demand button, that will push live events. Live events always drives content. Content drives outrageous traffic.

David: Because the only way you can make revenue is live events. You don’t do live events, you’re not…

Jesse: Live events is everything. It drives everything. Obviously, merchandise online is a bigger business than we ever anticipated.

David: That’s downstream of live events and people seeing the game.

Jesse: Exactly. We announced the one city world tour. The idea was no one wanted us, no one knew what Banana Ball was, but could we get one city to want us? So we announced this and we said we’re going to go to one city.

I’ll never forget the city of Mobile. They were interested. Again, Mobile was never on the radar. But the mayor had read my first book, and he was a fan of what we’re doing. He goes, what’ll it take? And I go, what do you mean what it’ll take? Go on, go on. He goes, well I know it’s COVID and there are challenges. Is there some form of investment? I go, what are you thinking?

So he threw out a small number and they got tourism involved, and they just invested a little bit in it. We sold all the tickets.

Ben: It’s a 3500 seat stadium, something like that?

Jesse: Yeah, it could have been five, but because of COVID we were only allowed to do 3500 each night with some spreading out. We said we need to do two nights. We did 3500 each night, sold them out. That started the business model.

Now, the sound went out. I had our announcer try to sing the national anthem because the anthem singer got caught in traffic. He couldn’t make it because all the traffic. When he went to sing the national anthem, I go, shark, let’s lead everybody. We’re back together here. Let’s all sing the national anthem. He goes, uh-one, uh-two, uh-one, two, three, four. Take me out to the… I go shark, aational anthem please. That’s how our first one city world tour started with, a start of taking me out to the ball game into the national anthem.

At that time, we were broadcasting ourselves too. We were putting it up free on Facebook I think because we were trying to learn how to broadcast a game as well. A lot of things didn’t go well, but fans showed up, and they stayed, and they were into it, and they were fired up. We’re like, those two games proved, let’s extend this a little more.

That’s when we said, 2022, let’s do seven cities, see where that is versus the Coastal Plane League team. We saw the success, and we said, 2022, we have to leave and go all in.

Ben: What type of ballparks are you playing in those seven cities?

Jesse: Everything we do is a test for the future years. We tested major league spring training homes. We’re like, could this help us get relationships with major league teams? Do it right, do it well, show that we can sell it out, get a good per cap for them, all of that.

We did West Palm Beach. We worked with them home at the Astros and the Nationals. If you look last year, two of our first stadium we ever run to was Houston.

We did the Rickwood before Major League did. We had the old ballpark in Birmingham, the old 8000-seat, oldest ballpark in America to create a story. We did a few different places, but again, just found places that were interested in us, that were willing to say, hey, we want to give you a shot. It was anybody that was willing. Then we had to prove our concept. After we proved sold out all seven of those, then it started opening up pretty heavily.

Ben: Was Major League Baseball starting to take notice? Because everyone who’s a baseball fan who’s listening to this will say, wait a minute. Some of this stuff started to show up in Major League Baseball a few years later, like the pitch clock. Is that at all motivated by the success of the Bananas?

Jesse: No. I appreciate that and I do hear that. Major League Baseball has a lot of smart executives and smart people on them. It just takes time because they got to work with so many parties—the union, the owners, the commissioner’s office, the fans. There are so many parties, it takes time.

The Major League Baseball games are 3 hours and 12 minutes. Something had to happen. I may have seen it, but I think they knew they had to make the games faster.

I think when you see more of the celebrating and when you start to see some trick plays coming into the game, I think that’s coming player-focused. I think people are starting to see that. That’s the part of the game. That’s how you get kids excited to play is you show them having fun. That’s why we play it as kids.

David: On the player side, as you’re transitioning to Banana Ball and already you’re becoming more popular, how has player recruitment evolved? I assume you have a lot of people who want to play for you, but to play for the Bananas or the Party Animals or your other teams, you need to be multi-talented. You can’t just be a good baseball player, right?

Jesse: Yes. At first it was very hard to recruit players. During this time before the 2022 tour, we convinced ESPN to do a series, the Banana Land, to do a five-episode series. It helped because we had Eric Burns a former major leaguer. He was like, I’ll give it a shot. I’ll coach the guys, so we had a character to coach.

We had only 50 players show up for a tryout for two teams. Literally, most guys are going to make the team if you show up because it’s weird. You’re playing in the middle of the spring, it’s only seven weekends, it was really hard.

You had some guys who played pro ball, you had some guys who played college, and some guys who played high school. There were no trick plays back then. That didn’t exist. It was just can you have fun? Can you dance or will you wear costumes? They were wearing costumes. Are you willing to not take yourself too seriously? So that first tryout was episode one (I think) of Banana Land.

One of the big things that happened was a young kid showed up. He was an average ball player, hadn’t played since high school. At the end of the tryout, he wasn’t going to make it. He just wasn’t good enough. He came up to me and said, hey, I got stilts. You want me to wear them? I said, no, not really, unless you can hit in them. He goes, I can hit in them, yes sir. I go, all right. Get in the batter’s box. Let’s see what you got.

I didn’t know this. He had never hit in stilts ever. He actually hadn’t worn stilts since he was 12 years old, but his mother saw the tryout, signed him up and said, you got to go to this. They said they want you to be different and do things people have never seen before in a baseball field. Because that was my whole thing. I want to see things I’ve never seen before.

He gets into the batter’s box and he starts actually hitting the ball and hitting line drives. Everyone stops what they’re doing. It is just shock, disbelief, they’re blown away. It is special.

I’ll never forget, right afterwards all the coaches got together. They said we can’t take him. I go, guys, he hits on stilts. What do you mean you can’t take him? They go, well he just can’t play at this level. We don’t have a roster spot. I go, make a roster spot for him. I don’t care what you call it. Call it the entertainment player. I go, I’m going to walk out, you guys figure it out.

I walked out, I came back 20 minutes later, they said okay, well create this entertainment roster spot. Then stilt became the first big viral thing with what we were doing. So we started seeing those people show up. After that, we started getting more and more better players, showing them, hey you got to be entertaining. You got to start doing trick plays. You got to show that.

So each year, now we have first rounders, second rounders, third rounders. We have pro guys who just didn’t make it, but they’re right on that cusp, and that’s who’s now joined a lot of the Banana Ball teams.

David: The social media flywheel is helping here too. People are just like, you’re becoming bigger on social, players are becoming bigger on social, people are seeing opportunity. Hey if I’m talented, I should come do this.

Jesse: 100%. Every night, it was what can we show tonight that people had never seen on a baseball field before? So every night we were trying to come up things. People didn’t realize, we spent time the week before coming up with all the ideas.

We followed SNL. We studied the Saturday Night Live model of pitching, table reads, writing, we followed their model. We would come up with these ideas. We’d go into the games with 10–15 ideas of things we want to do during the game, and all we got to do is capture them. You got to rehearse them, you got to nail them, capture them, and put it out. That was our whole model. Immediately, we started getting a million followers, 2 million. Now we’ve got 25, 26, 27. It just keeps growing.

Ben: It’s insane. It’s an interesting insight that most baseball players don’t have a second great skill. They don’t necessarily have the most charisma. But you need a couple of rosters full. As your notoriety grows, it’s pretty easy for you to feel the team of all talented baseball players who all have crazy other skills. It’s not like you need every baseball player to have that. You just need a couple of rosters full.

Jesse: You’re the average of the five people you surround yourself with. Think about these guys. Every day, they’re surrounding themselves by people that are entertainers, that are doing it at high level. Not just the baseball, but these guys have millions of followers on social media. They have more followers than most major league players. They’re seeing how to create content, how to do this.

We have a choreographed dance instructor. He’s our dancing first base coach. Maceo, he’s been with us many years. He works with the guys daily. I’ve watched guys who when they showed up couldn’t dance, they’ll go out to country bars and line dancing, and they’ll take over the whole dance floor.

It is unbelievable to see because again it’s just like working your ideal muscle. They’ve been working every day, every rehearsal. They’re learning dance moves, new dance moves that night that they have to perform, and then the next night a whole other dance. Think about that.

They’re learning all this trick plays, dancing, social content, how to play Banana Ball, how to be fans first and go up to the crowd and deliver roses and do things. Every day it’s a different track. They’re not just trying to be the best baseball player, they’re trying to be the greatest entertainer. Most fans first. It’s just a different thing we’re teaching.

Ben: And so at this point, had you created the Party Animals yet to create the opponent for the Bananas?

Jesse: Yeah, the Party Animals 2020. We had to have another team for them to play. In 2020, those first few games they started, but they were just the secondary brand. They were just “the underdog” or even the villain at that point. But then they took off.

In 2023, they actually won the tour. That’s when people call us the Globetrotters. I’m like guys, the Bananas don’t win every game. In fact this year in 2025, the Party Animals have been dominating. They have the first round picks, they hit home runs, they’re just unbelievable. They started creating a following. What was wild is now they have over 5–6 million followers. They have more followers than every Major League Baseball team on TikTok. It’s crazy.

We tested last year their own tour. They sold it out. And now, they have 21 game tour, sold it out. They have 500,000 people on their wait list because they’ve created their own identity of fun entertainment. They’re the greatest party in sports.

Ben: And they’re wearing crop top baseball uniforms. They’re their own form of sacrilege.

Jesse: Yes, they definitely go against the grain in many ways, and it’s fun to watch. Think about this. The Yankees, when they have success, you have people start turning against them. We started seeing more hate towards the Bananas recently as we’ve got bigger. But now, you have this other team or you have the Firefighters or the Tailgaters or Teams Five, Team Six. We’re trying to build this ecosystem of Banana Ball because we believe the game is truly entertaining. Take away all the dancing and entertainment. It’s an awesome game to watch, and we believe in it.

David: Has anybody else ever blended entertainment and actual sport like this? Sport is entertainment. That’s the whole thesis of all the episodes we’ve done on Acquired, but it is a competitive sport that you guys are playing at a high level.

Jesse: Obviously, the easiest is to look at is WWE, but WWE scripts the outcomes. That’s where the biggest difference is. I wrote this in 2022. I wrote a vision for 2026. I wrote a three-page thing I shared it with our team. I talked about the Harlem Globetrotters.

I said guys, right now that’s the comparison we see, and we have a runway. So did the Globetrotters in the 1940s. The Globetrotters played in front of 75,000 people in Berlin. The NBA was booking the Globetrotters to play, so they would actually get fans to stay for the NBA game. Wilt Chamberlain chose the Globetrotters before going into the NBA.

The Globetrotters beat the Lakers with George Mikan. The Globetrotters were playing competitive games all over. They were the biggest team in sports bar none. They were the biggest team in sports, arguably even bigger than the Yankees. They were huge. Then something happened.

David: I don’t think most people know that.

Jesse: No, they don’t. Then what happened? They did something. Abe Saperstein, very unique owner, great promoter, he said, ah, well we can do this all over the world. Why don’t we just make another Globetrotters team, and then make another Globetrotters team, and then we have three Harlem Globetrotters playing everywhere. Let’s script it so we can control the outcomes and make it a great show every night.

David: Like the traveling shows of Bravo. You have a Broadway hit, then you do a second cast, and that goes on the road.

Jesse: 100%. And they dominated for years. The 40s, the 50s, they were rolling in it, dominating because it was still a new thing. Then the NBA started to take some of the fun things from the Globetrotters, like through the legs, the entertainment of the game made it more fun. They got the higher-level ball players, because of the competitiveness, the Globetrotters are no longer competitive.

Then the Globetrotters, hey 100 years. I will always say a ton of respect. They are still in business 100 years. Very few businesses can do that. But not many people are wearing Globetrotter jerseys anymore because the relevance is not there.

What I wrote in that three-page piece was what if the Globetrotters created their own league in the 1940s? Would there be an NBA or would the Globetrotter League be the most entertaining competitive league in sports? I said we have a runway, but why don’t we disrupt ourselves before we have to? Because that’s what we did when the coastal playing league, when we were playing college summer ball, we had won back-to-back championships. We had no cost. You couldn’t pay the players back then. It was a great business model.

David: Oh, that’s right. College summer leagues, you actually can’t pay the players because it’s NCAA violation.

Jesse: Can’t pay the players. Great business model if you’re selling tickets. Great business model. We disrupted that to do something that no one was asking us for. And we went to it. Now, no one was asking us for a league, but we said, what if we did it now and learn? And instead of everyone else who starts a league, think about any league that started over the last 30 years. Generally, if they start the league, they get a TV rights deal, they get sponsorship, and they say let’s hope the fans come. But we got our money.

David: This is IPL.

Jesse: We got our money. IPL does a great job, but some of the other ones that have started more recently in the last 10–15 years.

David: But even IPL, the whole thing was the TV rights and the jersey sponsorships. They knew they were going to get fans because the fans were so starved for cricket.

Jesse: Our mindset is why don’t we create the fans first? If the Bananas at 18 million on social media, the Party Animals have over five. The Firefighters we just launched 12 months ago have over a million. The Tailgaters we just launched, they’re growing like crazy. If you create the fans first, then focus on everything else, could you have a more sustainable league in the future? That was the mindset.

Ben: Here’s an interesting, you have an opinion on this I’m sure because you have taken aside. All big, successful sports leagues, every team is owned by a different owner. Is it better or worse for the game and for the competition of the league that you own all the teams?

Jesse: We think about that regularly. A single entity, will there be the storylines? Everyone cares about story. That’s where this is going to drive. We got the entertainment I believe in the game, but it’s going to come down the storylines. You got to create coaches. The Deion Sanders effect, you got to create coaches that are the…

David: Heroes and the villains.

Jesse: Storyline in the sense that they’re going to be the one talking. They’re the one going to be doing all this, getting people fired up. We think about that. And there are a few other ideas. Obviously, there are some things that the Indian Premier League do that’s very interesting on creating storylines, which we may look into. You’ve got to create that.

I think it will be hard, but we’ll be able to control the experience, the end to end better, and not let another owner do something that might not be truly fans first. Every other owner would say TV rights, sponsorship, we’re going to charge ticket fees. What do you mean? We’re going to charge taxes for our fans. Why are you paying all the taxes? That is crazy. We pay all the taxes on every merchandise item, every ticket item. That is crazy. They would do it for short-term revenue, but we’re focused on long-term fans over short-term profits. It’s a big difference.

Ben: The other thing that your model benefits from is you can never have an owner of a really successful team, who then wants to lock in their advantage. You economically don’t care which of these teams becomes the most successful. As long as the game stays competitive, each team is accruing a bunch of fans. It’s fun to watch and competitive on the field. You’re more invested in the sport than any given team, which is different than other sports leagues.

Jesse: Yeah. Can each team upscale? For instance, can the Party Animals start selling in major league stadiums? And my thought would be yes. Could each team, not just the Bananas, go to Mexico or go to Australia or go to Japan and sell out? You start building that where it creates more excitement and demand. It’s not just one team.

Ben: So okay, catch us up. You’re selling out football stadiums now. What do the next few years look like?

Jesse: Well that’s been hard, just so you know.

Ben: I bet.

Jesse: At first, we weren’t sure we could do major league stadiums. Major league stadiums, all of them have exclusive ticket deals.

David: This is what we foreshadowed earlier.

Jesse: We built our own ticket platform.

David: By exclusive ticket deals, you mean Ticketmaster or another platform have the exclusive rights to all events.

Jesse: Ticketmaster, tickets.com, they have every single event. We weren’t sure we would be able to do this. We had to find a way in and basically say we’re not competing every ticket sold in advance. You can still sell some, the premium suites on yours. We’re going to sell it. We found a few that said, we’ll do it. Find that right precedent. We found that right precedent.

Then we said, well if something happened where we couldn’t work with Major League Baseball anymore, what else do we have to grab onto? And no one’s really looking at football stadiums at all. I’ve always learned from Sam Walton, go where others won’t go. Kmart and Sears were obsessed with going to the cities where everyone was. Sam goes, no. We’re going to go to these suburbs where no one is right now and we’re going to build such a great experience.

Obviously, IKEA has followed that model, and so and so. So go where others won’t go? We can go to every city in the country, small cities, big cities, but it’s not just baseball stadiums. We said, what if we experimented with going to a football stadium. With Banana Ball, could it be a great show?

We got one that was all-in. They set a deal for us that was a great deal, a great precedent. We said, let’s do it. You build the field, we’ll take care of the netting, we sell all the tickets, there’s no rent. Let’s find a deal that works out. You’ll make all the food and bev, et cetera. That’s one of the things we don’t realize. We don’t pay rent anywhere we go, but they make huge money on food and bev, and some of the premium tickets

David: And teams are now using the ability for their fan base or customer base to have access to Banana tickets as a selling point.

Jesse: And think about this. We went to Clemson. 60%, 50,000 people came from outside of the state of South Carolina to Clemson. Talk about economic impact. We’re seeing that everywhere we go. Cities tourism now want to invest because when we come in, people are coming in for this bucket list trip because there are three million people on the wait list. If you get a chance to go, we’re fortunate people are coming.

David: The Eras Tour of sports.

Jesse: Well, I would never. She’s the best there is. We said could it work at a football stadium? And we went to Clemson, 81,000 fans, 190 feet down the left field line. There were 11 home runs, but the game was played in an hour and 43 minutes and it was one of the most exciting Banana Ball games we’ve ever had. I was like, heck yes. Since then, we’ve heard from every stadium over 100,000.

Ben: Is the left field outfield wall ridiculously far?

Jesse: Oh yes. One’s like 350 down the line and one is like 200 down the line. Then we have a 50-foot net. Oh, it’s crazy. It’s laughable.

Ben: Because in the old days, when they had municipal stadiums, they would accommodate where you could push out one of the walls for baseball.

Jesse: Yup. No, we can’t move anything in football stadiums. It’s just, hey, here’s the field. Let’s put the field in. Here’s a giant net and let’s do it. Again, we found a partner, Netting Pros, that would say, hey, we’ll supply the net. We’ll do some partnerships. That was a unique partnership that we were able to make work, and it worked. Then we did Nissan and Tennessee, and we’re doing two at the Panther Stadium in Charlotte. Now, we have a lot of opportunities looking in the future.

Ben: Your business requires way less risk and way less operating capital. It’s much more asset-light than traditional sports businesses because you have this advantage, this leverage where you could say, look. People really, really, really want to see the Bananas. They can’t see them in their city. I bet I can lure close to 100,000 people into this stadium to have a unique, amazing experience. You should give me the stadium for free. And people go, sure.

Jesse: They’re not using it. You’re looking at these assets. We’ve often called a circus. PT Barnum, 146 years of touring. And now they went out for a few years. Now they’re back. Touring model can work if you minimize your expenses. But we travel with 200+ people. When you talk about minimizing expenses, comparison, the Globetrotters travel with 30, we travel with 200–220.

We do the whole broadcast. Both teams, all the entertainment. We hire 300–400 locally, Nana scanners, people in banana costumes scanning your tickets. We hire people to do merchandise. It’s a very big operation. It costs each person that travels $35,000–$40,000 a year in just travel expenses for each person. If you’re traveling with 200 people, that’s a huge expense.

But we believe in doing the unscalable to make sure they feel our presence there from everything. Our entertainment, our cast, we travel with a whole cast. You name it, our dancers, our bands, everything. That’s worth it for us. There are different models. We spend more here, we spend less here. But also we pay the players dramatically more than minor league baseball. Not even close.

David: Average minor league players making not even average. There are caps on this stuff. I remember from my family dude, minor league players, you get a signing bonus when you get drafted, but then your salary is poverty line, if you’re lucky.

Jesse: They increased it, like AAA is $35,000 and you help out that are there. But like we have numerous players and most players in the future, six figures-plus. So you get paid well and they play half the games.

We only play on Friday, Saturdays, and Sundays. Maybe a Thursday. No Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays. We try to put our money into our people, into the experience, and not put the money in things like rent or something that we can’t actually make a huge impact with.

Ben: I’m dense. Help me understand this. You’re paying your players three times as much. What’s the top line that supports that? Where’s all the profitability come from that allows you to invest in your players more? Because you don’t have sponsorships.

Jesse: You sell 2.2 million tickets. Ticket prices are between $35 and $60. Major league stadiums, football stadium, $60 for the lower bowl, $50 for the middle, $40 for the top.

Then merchandise. We’re very fortunate, that is our model. We can serve 15,000–20,000 people per game of merchandise. In football stadiums, it could be even more. At a major league stadium, you can look at 15,000 people, which 40%–50% are buying merch not just for themselves, but potentially they buy multiple items.

You’ve seen the numbers on the masters. Obviously, what they do in four days, we’re not like that, but it’s a big part of our business. We keep our prices low. A $30 shirt is $30 with no tax and no extra fees.

David: What did you say the tier pricings are for football stadiums?

Jesse: $40, $50 and $60.

David: My God. Go to an NFL game, you’re not getting a $40 ticket anyway.

Jesse: Yeah, and a $60 ticket is $60. What’s the challenge for us and the next fans first thing we got to figure out is the secondary market. People look at us. I hear every day your tickets are the most expensive in the world.

David: And that probably makes you crazy.

Jesse: There are memes of me behind bars, guys, and saying, Jesse Cole should be put in jail for his ticket pricing. The secondary market. How much do you think StubHub vivid seat [...] invest to be the top tier on Google? I bet you it’s millions of dollars.

David: Even though you have your own ticketing platform, you still can’t totally control secondary market.

Jesse: No, because it’s speculative. What’ll happen on October 9th, we do a world tour draft, which is one of my favorite events. Most teams, they do a schedule release. We actually make it into a live event. We had fans fly in from 38 states to find out where we’re going to play. We make it a huge big event. There is Steve Jobs, MacWorld, I want to make it big. We announced the new teams.

That night, there are no tickets available, except on all those secondary websites. There are thousands of fake tickets, speculative tickets that are being sold for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. That night, our lottery list opens. Two million people will join the lottery list in 48 hours. But everyone else who just searched Savannah Bananas tickets or Banana Ball tickets, they see all those and then they’re buying fake tickets.

David: Oh, so they’re not even real tickets.

Jesse: They’re speculative. Every night, we have people fly into town, show up in that morning they got their tickets. They said, sorry, these weren’t real tickets. They brought their whole family. Every night, we have to figure out how to take care of them fans first, whether it’s standing room or do something. Every single night. We’re going to figure out how to solve this problem. We got some ideas. Average ticket price on the secondary market’s $300+. That’s what we could charge tickets for, but we don’t. That’s a big problem we’re trying to solve.

Ben: Is it just because those websites allow you to list tickets without verifying that you actually have the tickets?

Jesse: Correct.

Ben: We’ve actually seen this for our upcoming radio city show. I logged on to a non-Ticketmaster secondary site. I looked at a seat, it was very expensive, and I thought, huh. I know for a fact there’s going to be a camera in that seat. That seat is actually not available. I sure hope no one pays $1000 for that seat.

Jesse: There you go. Again, it’s part of the model. We’re going to get there. It just takes time.

David: Tell us about broadcast. What is your broadcast and media rights strategy?

Jesse: Again, put yourself in the fan’s shoes. What do people hate about broadcast? Commercials. Nobody likes commercials. How could we create an ad-free experience?

What else do people hate? Paywalls. Where’s the game on? I don’t know. Peacock, HBO, I don’t know. God bless it. I understand the NFL, Nascar. I have so much respect and admiration. They are maximizing every opportunity, and they’re learning from it. It’s great. For us—I’m putting myself in our fan shoes—it’s like, what if we keep every game for free on YouTube? Every single game.

Now, there is very little money on YouTube. We’re talking hundreds of dollars a game. Very, very little. But for the fans, makes it easy. I believed that at some point, we could have games on national networks, but only if it was on our terms.

The first few years talking to all these groups, they’re like, no. It’s exclusive. We’ve never done it that way. I go, well we’ll only do it if it’s not exclusive. And they go, we’re offering you this much money. I go, doesn’t matter. We’re good. Our business is not built on that. We’re profitable, successful, and healthy based on tickets and merchandise. I said, no.

Ben: You’ve never taken equity capital and you’ve never raised debt. This is a debt-free business that you operate.

Jesse: It’s my wife and I. We have the team. That’s it. We just kept saying no. Finally, they were like, we can’t ignore you guys anymore. That was actually how I got the phone call from the National Baseball Hall of Fame aside. They said, we can’t ignore the Bananas anymore. We have to put you guys in the pool of fame. I was like, this wasn’t how I expected to get that call.

Fun fact that, guys. They have the original idea book where I wrote the rules. I called show ball back then, and it’s got even the golden batter, which we’d introduced to last year, but a lot of the original rules are in there. It’s got some really cool things.

But anyway, ESPN and some of these others said, we can’t ignore you. I said, guys, we have to keep it. We have to keep it on YouTube. They said, we’ve never done anything like that. I go, well. And they said, I guess we can make the exception. And they made the exception.

Ben: So they’re paying you for broadcast rights that they’re going to put on their apps and ecosystems. They’re going to run ads against or they’re going to monetize however they’re going to monetize. You are broadcasting the exact same games ad-free on YouTube.

Jesse: Every game is on YouTube. All the promotions, the in-between, the halftime shows that we do, you can watch on YouTube. Or you can watch on ESPN and there’ll just be some commercials filled in it. We are able to hold our ground. And now, we have the same thing with TNT and some others we’re about to announce.

It’s been a long process, and we still spend millions of dollars on a broadcast. The broadcast in itself right now is not making money. We’re investing $5 million-plus just this year alone building control rooms. We have multiple tours going on. It’s not covering itself yet, but it will and it’s best for fans.

Ben: Does the broadcast partner take your media feeds or do they bring in their own duplicative cameras and crews and control rooms?

Jesse: Here’s a funny story. Our first game on ESPN, this was 2022 and this was when we were still working on, they brought in a crew from the outside. This wasn’t ESPN, but they brought in a crew to help do it. The first hitter struck out in 10 seconds. Three pitches in 10 seconds. The guy directing it is sweating bullets. He goes, I can’t do this. This is too fast. I can’t, because they’re used to a baseball game.

David: Stepping out of the box, adjust the batting gloves.

Jesse: We had an intern, a seasonal person, step in and start leading that show. Now we’re like, we just got to do this in-house. Now we’ve built it all, BTV, we’ve built it all in-house.

Ben: Whoa. When it’s broadcast on these partners, it’s using the output of your control room.

Jesse: It’s our entire team. But guys, we have failed every step of the way.

Ben: That’s not how the NFL works.

Jesse: No, most places they have. I think UFC does their own, I think some do their own, but a lot of times it’s all hired out. It’s just too expensive. It doesn’t make sense.

David: Fox and CBS are coming in and doing the NFL.

Jesse: It’s astronomical, but people don’t realize this. Our first game on primetime ESPN, not ESPN2 last year, the transmission went out for the first 10 minutes. The ESPN anchors were like—

David: Go to YouTube?

Jesse: Well, looks like the Bananas can’t handle us right now. We finally got back on and it was buffering and we were struggling. My point is, we failed every step of the way. Just people don’t remember the failures because we move on to the next at bat.

Our first shipment of T-shirts, guys, had too many Ns in Bananas. We misspelled our own name with our first shipment of T-shirts.

Our first major league game, our ticket system got hacked. Literally our ticket system in Houston got hacked. It wasn’t working the whole night. I was like, we’re done. We’re never doing a major league game again. It got hacked. Cyber attack. People on the ground. It was crazy. We have failed every step of the way, but we’re willing to get to the next step bat. I think that’s where it’s like all this. We don’t know how to do all this. We’re learning it.

Ben: What’s the vision for broadcast going forward?

Jesse: Oh, again, the vision that I wrote in 2022 was like, well how do you create a broadcast that again is must watch? It’s not just the game. Could every player be mic’d up? You have your favorite player that you could be tuned in. What are these other things that can make the game so interesting?

Because right now, I believe people are bigger fans of individuals than they are teams. It’s becoming that way because as individuals, Jackson Olson’s got a couple of a million followers, KJ Jackson, coach Rack. It’s like, how do I get full access of watching him? And there are these different ways. We need to learn how to do that. That’s going to take a couple of years. All these ways of looking at it, we just want to control it so we can learn faster. That’s the model.

Ben: You are leaving money on the table and profit dollars on the table everywhere.

Jesse: Yeah, CFOs hate us.

Ben: I get the sense you are aware of this and love this because there are two ways of saying it. One, it’s for the fans, it’s your North star. All of that is true. But two, man does this build a stored potential energy into Banana Ball as a sport, into these teams, into the relationship with the fan, into NPS. You’re charging up a massive battery right now in the profit dollars you choose not to collect.

Jesse: I think that’s part of it. What’s so great is to see our fans defend us when any people get after us. I tell our team, don’t write back. Let our fans defend us. Let our fans back us up. Because that’s powerful.

What we’ve been doing behind closed doors as well—we haven’t promoted it—we have a K club. Again, K, symbol for potassium. We have thousands of members. Thousands. We haven’t released numbers yet, but it’s growing. We don’t advertise or promote it, but it’s your way to guarantee tickets to any game.

You’re part of this community on Facebook. They talk and they share everything, and we do special things for them. We get to have special meetups and all this. We’re building this loyal, bigger than any season ticket holder base in the country. And now, it’s all over the country, this K club group. They pay $59 a year and they get complete access. They can get any ticket they want to any game, and it’s all part of this.

Ben: There are so many elements. Even before you said the membership thing, I was going to say, there are so many elements of Costco here where you are minimally value extractive. It’s the idea of scaled shared economies where you’re passing as much as possible onto the fans, and try to build this durable relationship that they’re super big fans of.

Jesse: We’ve shared that Costco episode from you guys with our whole staff. The fact that they were even literally processing their own, they went all the way in to control it, to keep that hotdog at $1.50 and keep the chickens at their price. They went all the way.

There’ll be a point where we do that with merchandise. We’re already doing it with TV. Tickets. we’re already doing it, but we need to figure out the secondary market. You’ll play the long game.

If the company is healthy enough, me and Emily are not in an airbed anymore. We have a real bed. We’re happy. We don’t need any. We don’t have to appease any shareholders. We don’t need to appease any investors. If we have minimal profits every year but we’re doing things for the long game, it’s going to win in the end. That’s what we believe in.

David: I don’t even need to ask you the question. I know that you’re doing this for the rest of your life. I can’t imagine you doing anything else with your days. You’re not looking to exit or maximize short-term profits. Why wouldn’t you operate this way?

Jesse: I want this for my grandkids. I want to create something that we love. It’s all about chasing moments, guys. You bring people together. There’s nothing like it. When you see after a game, thousands of people singing Stand By Me, which out of all things, it’s wild. They feel like they’re a part of something. It’s those moments that I’m chasing, that energy. So why would you ever give it up?

We’re going to keep building, and each team has their own moments that they’re creating. Seeing a football stadium, 80,000 people, and everyone’s got their flashlights on their phone and everyone’s singing Yellow. Look at the stars. Look how they shine for you. It sounds Kumbaya, I get it. But every night I get goosebumps.

When I was at Fenway Park, which I grew up south of Boston, I dream to pitch at Fenway, and I looked around 38,000 people at Fenway all singing Yellow, I was like, there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be. I think that’s what our fans feel like as well.

David: Well, you do pitch at Fenway now. Just a different definition of pitch.

Jesse: Yeah, different way.

David: You P.T. Barnum pitch at Fenway.

Ben: Well, Jesse, I know we got to let you go. David and I cannot wait. He’s going to come up to Seattle for the T-Mobile Park games. I don’t know how many you’re doing here in September. I can’t wait.

Jesse: It’s got to be fun. We’ll get you guys there early so you can see the full show. We start early. It’s entertain always.

Ben: There’s a parade and it starts at like 2:00 PM, right?

Jesse: 2:00 PM, yeah. You’ll get your steps in. It’ll be worth it, though.

David: Amazing.

Ben: Can’t wait. All right, everyone, Jesse Cole. Listeners, we’ll see you next time.

David: We’ll see you next time.