How the Savannah Bananas Disrupted the Business of Baseball

Failure isn’t what sells out stadiums, builds three-million-person waitlists or spawns viral TikToks. But for Jesse and Emily Cole, co-owners of the Savannah Bananas, accepting failure has been part of the formula. The team’s improbable rise rests on a culture of experimentation where strikeouts and stumbles are just steps toward achieving a home run.

“You have to build a culture of innovation and, as a part of that, the culture has to be accepting of failure,” says Les Alexander, the John Glynn Endowed Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. “You have to allow your staff, your team, your group, whatever it is, to try new things to see what works and accept the fact that some of them will not. But hopefully, more of them work than don’t.”

That embrace of trial and error has turned the Bananas, known for their circus-like entertainment and fruity puns, into a viral phenomenon that is now also the subject of a new Darden business case, “Innovation at Bat: The Savannah Bananas.”  

Written by Alexander, the case will debut in spring 2026 in his second-year elective, Venture Capital Leadership, using the team’s story to probe how innovation and market disruption can propel an organization like the Bananas.

The case also pushes students to wrestle with the Bananas’ next challenge:  Having sold out every home game in Savannah as well as major league baseball stadiums on the road, where do they go from here? Is the success sustainable? How do they keep fans coming back? What does long-term success look like?

The case focuses on a specific dilemma: Should the Coles create a Banana Ball league, with new teams in new locations throughout the country, all playing their invented game of Banana Ball?

The idea raises questions any entrepreneur would recognize: If you scale too fast, do you dilute the brand? If you franchise, will other owners share your “fans first” obsession? And if much of the appeal rests on one showman in a yellow tux —Jesse — how do you build something that can scale?

How Failure Sparked Innovation

To understand why failure is so integral to the Bananas’ success story, one has to rewind the clock to Jesse’s early job in college summer league baseball.

A former college pitcher, he was just 23 when he became general manager of a team in Gastonia, North Carolina, that had 200 fans coming to games, $268 in its bank account, and was losing $150,000 a year. “We were one of the lowest levels of baseball, and the team was failing,” Jesse said on the podcast ACQ2. “We had to turn it around.”

The Gastonia Grizzlies were playing traditional baseball, but Jesse realized he’d never be able to hire the best players and had to make the games more about entertainment and the fan experience. “We tried to get people excited about it,” he says. “It was 10 years there of experimenting. And that's when people started to say, ‘I'm coming to the show. I'm coming to have fun.’”

Fast forward to late 2015, when the Coles arrived in Savannah with the goal of making baseball fun and bringing more fans to historic Grayson Stadium. They named their new company Fans First Entertainment to highlight their focus on their fans. “That's our mission: Fans first. Everything we do is fans first. So ‘fans first’ became our guiding light, our North Star,” he tells ACQ2.

In the first few months, they only sold a handful of tickets for their collegiate summer league team. In 2016, just months before their first game, the organization had run out of money and over-drafted its account, according to its website. The Coles had to sell their house and empty their savings accounts to keep the team going.

Jesse refers to this beginning chapter as a “colossal failure.”  

Then, in February 2016, they asked locals to submit a name for the new team. From the numerous submissions they received they selected the name the Savannah Bananas. And the rest, as they say, is history.

After several years of success playing summer college baseball in the Coastal Plain League in Savannah, Jesse started to notice that despite the fan’s enjoyment of the Bananas games, there was something missing. The problem, he thought, was not in the entertainment they were providing, it was due to issues he recognized with the game of baseball itself.

So in 2021, to create a better fan experience and make baseball more fun, they developed Banana Ball — a fast-paced version of baseball with unique rules, such as fans catching foul balls for an out, winning an inning counts as one point until the last inning when all runs count, and games played with a two-hour time limit. (If you're not familiar with Banana Ball, catch up here.)

Banana Ball proved to be such a hit with fans that, in 2023, the team announced it was leaving the Coastal Plain League to play only Banana Ball games. 

Innovation Beyond Silicon Valley

For Alexander, the Bananas are a reminder that innovation isn’t confined to Silicon Valley.

“We tend to think of innovation as being associated with technology companies, but here is a company operating in the entertainment space, the sports space, baseball in particular, and they've disrupted an industry that's been around for over 150 years.”

The Bananas have more than 15 million followers on social media, including more TikTok followers than every Major League Baseball team combined. And their waitlist for tickets has swelled to 3.2 million fans.

This summer the Bananas played at Clemson University’s football stadium on two evenings in front of a capacity crowd of 81,000 each night and, in September, played two sold-out games at Yankee Stadium.

The point for Alexander’s students is that innovation is a mindset. “You can take any industry and think about it differently,” he says. “What could you do to enhance the experience of your customers or clients? That's exactly the way they approached this question.”

Moreover, the Coles didn’t innovate once and stop. “They are continuously innovating, trying to figure out what’s next and how to improve the experience for the fans,” he adds.

Walking the Walk On Customer Experience

If innovation is the method, “fans first” is the mission.

Alexander emphasizes how far the Coles are willing to go to live up to it. In Grayson Stadium in Savannah, they removed advertising signage from the venue because, as Jesse put it, “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.”

They also have a unique approach to tickets in Savannah: With their all-in system, a single game ticket includes both your seat, food and beverages.

“They really walk the walk of ‘fans first’,” says Alexander. “They do everything that they can to put the fans first in that experience. And I think it differentiates them, and I think fans really recognize it.”

There are times when that focus can be costly.

In one instance, the team mistakenly sent an email to 45,000 fans offering access to tickets when only 4,000 seats were available. The Bananas honored the mistake, giving the remaining 41,000 fans complimentary tickets for games in other cities. The error cost them $6 million but preserved fan trust.

The Power of 10 Daily Ideas

The case also explores Jesse Cole’s distinctive leadership style. Alexander describes him as authentic, enthusiastic and relatable.

“I think he truly cares about making this experience for the fans the best he could possibly achieve,” says Alexander. “He pays attention. It's the reason Banana Ball got created — because he noticed people were leaving the stadium before the game was over, even though he thought they were doing a great job. He asked: ‘Why is this happening?’ And decided he had to do more to engage the fans by changing the game of baseball.”

Around 2016, Jesse started writing down 10 ideas a day. “That’s a lot of bad ideas — I mean, I'm talking about 70%-80% bad ideas,” he tells the ACQ2 hosts.

The point is that he doesn’t shy away from trying new things and failing — and learning.

“We failed every step of the way. [But] people don't remember the failures because we move on to the next at bat,” says Jesse. “We don't know how to do all this. We're learning.”

The Expansion Dilemma

Even with sold-out crowds and viral fame, the Bananas are at a crossroads. Should they launch a full Banana Ball league with multiple teams? Or would that dilute the Bananas brand that made them successful?

Fans First Entertainment’s growth has been rapid. Today, four teams play the game of Banana Ball: The Savannah Bananas, Party Animals, Firefighters and Texas Tailgaters (all owned by the Coles). Next year, they plan to add two more traveling teams, creating a six-team “Banana Ball Championship League,” or BBCL.

This is how Alexander frames the core strategic dilemma the Bananas now face: If you grow it too much, do you dilute the brand? If you franchise the game and license teams to new owners, will they have competing motivations where it's not always fans first anymore?

It’s a question without a right answer — and that’s the point. In Alexander’s classroom, students debate expansion, brand equity and the risks of scaling too fast.

Beyond Yellow Uniforms

For Alexander, the Bananas prove that disruption can come from anywhere.

“Just repeating what somebody else is doing will not make you a market leader,” he says. “If you want to truly be a market leader, you've got to think outside the box. You've got to do things that are different, that are disruptive, and that's what they’ve done.”

That’s why “Innovation at Bat” isn’t just about a baseball team in yellow uniforms. It’s about the messy, exhilarating process of building something new, often through much trial and error. It’s also about the paradox at the heart of every innovative venture: Failure isn’t the opposite of success. Sometimes, it’s the only way to get there.

This article is based on the case “Innovation at Bat: The Savannah Bananas,” published in September 2025 by Darden Business Publishing.