The dance videos are everywhere, the yellow jerseys are hard to miss, and the question keeps coming up: do the Savannah Bananas actually play baseball?

According to head coach Tyler Gillum, they do, and at a high level.

“We’ve got to have high-level guys to do what we do,” Gillum said. “We have 150 players in-house between six teams. Thirty-five of those guys played minor-league baseball. The majority of them played [Division I] baseball, or they played independent ball, so we’ve got a highly competitive group.”

Just four years ago, the Bananas were one of thousands of summer baseball teams around the country. Now they are playing on ESPN, selling out Yankee Stadium and drawing 102,000 fans to college football stadiums.

When Gillum joined the Bananas in 2018, he had just finished a season as an assistant coach in the Cape Cod League and had coached in the Texas Collegiate League, where 35 of his players were drafted in three summers. At the time, the Bananas were known for elaborate entertainment, but they were still one of many collegiate summer baseball teams.

Gillum and owner Jesse Cole spent the next five summers building what the Bananas are now. Gillum said the fan experience sits at the centre of it, but the standard of baseball holds it together.

“Our goal is to make baseball fun, be fans first and entertain always,” Gillum said. “Where people get confused is they think, because we’re entertaining, we don’t care about the performance on the baseball side of it, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. … If there’s a bunch of errors, it’s sloppy and pitchers can’t throw strikes, this doesn’t work.”

Left-handed pitcher Austin Drury is one example of the kind of player the Bananas recruit. Drury played three seasons at North Florida, was picked in the 34th round by the Los Angeles Dodgers, then spent four seasons in the minors before playing independent and overseas baseball. He joined the Bananas this year.

“Everyone here understands they have two jobs in one,” Drury said. “They have to entertain, and then, in the ballplayer sense, they’ve got to take care of the business that they’ve been doing their whole life.”

Most players in the Banana Ball Championship League have played at a high level for years. Reese Alexiades went undrafted out of Pepperdine, then played two seasons in the Pioneer League and won MVP in 2023, but still did not hear from MLB teams.

“That’s just how it goes,” Alexiades said. “I love baseball to death, so I’m going to play as long as I can. I believe this is where God meant me to be, making an impact greater than I could have ever had playing in the major leagues.”

Max Jung Goldberg, another former Pioneer League player who joined the Bananas, said the workload catches people off guard.

“A lot of people misunderstand the grind that we go through because each week we’re almost preparing like it’s a football game.

“You go through three to four days of practicing to get ready for the show,” he said. “You have a travel day and then another travel day on both ends of the road trip. … You’re dialed in all week. It’s not just ‘show up to the yard and play.’”

Banana Ball uses rules designed to keep games within a two-hour time limit. Gillum said practices still look much like college practices, but players also have to adjust to a quicker pace and a different style. Because pitchers can catch the ball and throw again straight away, Banana Ball has recorded strikeouts in as little as 8.6 seconds.

“You’ve got to train guys a little bit differently on the cardio side,” Gillum said. “Our game moves fast, so what we try to do is get our guys’ heart rates up so they can understand how to control that heart rate.”

The Bananas have also pushed back on comparisons to the Harlem Globetrotters. They wanted it known that their baseball is competitive and unscripted. Teams may plan home run celebrations, but they do not know when those moments will come.

Building out the Banana Ball Championship League was part of that. The league added the Loco Beach Coconuts and the Indianapolis Clowns last year. In early May, the Bananas lost both games to the Texas Tailgaters in front of 102,000 fans at Kyle Field in College Station, Texas. They also lost a game the previous weekend to the Party Animals at Yankee Stadium.

Adding teams meant adding players, and Gillum said there was no shortage of interest.

“Over 5,000 people filled out the form,” Gillum recalled. “Some of these people have never played baseball before, so we filter those out. We invited about 200 players to six different tryouts around the country, and then we invited about 120 players into the Banana Ball Draft last November.”

Gillum said Banana Ball could soon become an alternative to low-level professional baseball for some players.

“I think here quickly you’ll start seeing guys that might get drafted in the 15th round, 18th round [of the MLB draft] and get offered $10,000 for a bus ticket to go to minor-league baseball, and those guys are going to start turning that down to set themself up to come play Banana Ball on a 12-month contract,” Gillum said.

That 12-month contract was a deliberate move. Gillum said he knew from college baseball that many players need offseason work to get by.

“So we were like, ‘All right, let’s give these guys 12-month contracts and pay them just like an employee every two weeks.’”

Banana Ball players average $110,000 a year and get healthcare. Many also have brand deals, and a few earn close to $200,000. Players cannot be released unless there is a “breach of personal conduct.” Injured players stay on in fan engagement roles.

For players like first-year Banana JT Sokolove, who played at Michigan State, the appeal is also the stage. He is playing in packed stadiums across the country less than a year after college.

“Every kid, when they grow up, wants to play in the major leagues,” Sokolove said with a smile. “This isn’t MLB, but to get to be on these fields is unbelievable. … Sometimes the stands don’t always fill up when you’re playing independent ball or minor-league ball, so when we get to show up in a stadium like [Yankee Stadium] and it’s full of fans that are excited to be there, I get goose bumps every single time.”

Alexiades said that love of the game sits behind what the Bananas are trying to do.

“You look at how serious you can take things, and how ‘businessy’ baseball can be,” Alexiades said. Sometimes you just lose the fun of it. I hear so many stories of ‘I just lost the love of the game.’ So what we’re really trying to do is bring fun into baseball.”

Gillum said Major League Baseball will remain its own thing, but Banana Ball is offering something different to fans.

“Major League Baseball is going to be Major League Baseball. Those are going to be the best players in the world. One thousand percent. But what we’re trying to do, from the fan experience side, is different, and we have 4 million people on the wait list to get tickets.”

Sokolove said some fans may never like the format, but he believes it is helping people reconnect with baseball.

“We all love the sport of baseball. That’s why we still do what we do,” Sokolove said. “But I do think it’s growing the sport of baseball, and people are reconnecting with the game. There might be people who say: ‘They’re not playing traditional baseball. I don’t like it,’ and that’s OK. They can have their opinion.”

“We still love them for how they think about the game of baseball because we love the regular game of baseball, too. … But we’re growing the game in the sense that more kids get to connect and people start to fall in love with baseball. I think it’s a good thing that we’re doing.”

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