Tuesday, March 26

Savannah Bananas unveil Banana Ball World Tour 2023 schedule


SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) – The Savannah Bananas started their World Tour with a single city in 2021: Mobile, Alabama.

Although they expanded the tour in 2022, the Bananas kept their traveling exhibition series to just the southeast.

“We got made fun of a lot, calling it the World Tour but we only stayed in three states basically,” said Bananas team president Jared Orton, “This year, we started thinking about the different regions of the country and we were like, ok, how do we go to the west coast? How do we go to the Northeast? How do we go to some AA baseball markets and AAA markets? Last year, we tried spring training in Florida and now we’re thinking about what’s the opportunity to try spring training in Arizona.”

All that brainstorming and planning culminated on Tuesday night, with an hourlong 2023 World Tour schedule reveal streamed live on the Bananas YouTube channel.

“Everything with the Bananas, we try to do dramatically different than everyone else,” said team president Jesse Cole. “This has been in the works for months, trying to think about whether we can do an NFL Draft-style announcement and really go over the top.”

The schedule itself fit the grand scale of the announcement: it consists of 70 games in 33 cities across the country, as opposed to just 14 games and seven cities last season.

Savannah will start the tour on Friday, Feb. 17 in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Bananas’ first home game will be the weekend afterward on Feb. 25 in Grayson Stadium, the anniversary of the franchise’s founding.

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That’s the beginning of an eight-month schedule that will go all the way until Sept. 16, 2023, when the Bananas will travel to Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, New York to play at the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The full schedule can be found on the Bananas’ Twitter account. At the time of publishing, the team’s website had crashed from too many users trying to access it at once.

All games will be played under “Banana Ball” rules; a unique set of conditions designed by the Bananas and introduced in 2021. Banana Ball is played with a strict two-hour time limit, a different scoring system and prohibition on bunting, among other things.

The Bananas announced the decision to play exclusively Banana Ball right after finishing up their 2022 season and leaving the Coastal Plain League, the collegiate summer league that served as the Bananas’ home ever since the team’s founding in 2016.

Most games will pit the Bananas against their rivals, the Party Animals. However, there will also be a “Challenger Series” that features other professional, independent teams squaring off with the Bananas.

“I think it’s going to be pretty interesting to see whether the Bananas can hold up,” Orton said. “Maybe we do something for the Party Animals; we play a Party Animals game at Grayson Stadium against a challenger team. We’re going to continue to think ‘what is the best possible experience for people to see something they’ve never seen before?’ That’s what we think Banana ball can be.”

Longtime manager Tyler Gillum has signed on to be the team’s full-time coach. Player selection will take place over the course of the next few months. Several Bananas legends, like catcher Bill LeRoy and pitcher Kyle Luigs, were on hand to announce cities that the team would be visiting.

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“Everything we do is for our fans,” said entertainment director Zack Frongillo. “Whatever show we do, wherever we go, we want our fans to feel like they’re getting the fans first experience. As for bringing the show on the road to hundreds of thousands of people, it’s just exciting.”

Tickets will go on sale at a later date, per the Bananas Twitter page.



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