The Savannah Bananas are not the future of baseball. And that's okay.
The Savannah Bananas are a Coastal Plain League team based in Savannah, Georgia, that for all intents and purposes is the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. They have their own list of rules, such as foul balls caught by the crowd are outs and players can steal first base. Their players have played Guitar Hero while walking up to the plate and wore kilts in the field during their St. Patrick's Day game. They perform breakdance routines for the crowd in between innings, and if that wasn't enough, this dancing is also supplemented by a senior citizens dance squad. It's absolutely ludicrous stuff, the energy of which cannot be adequately described in words.
But one of the comments I see most often whenever I come across these videos is how the Savannah Bananas are the "future of baseball." Which they definitively are not. The MLB is never in a billion years going to look at the Bananas and be like, "Huh, maybe our players should learn some breakdancing." There's still something to be said about maintaining the tradition and consistency of a sport over time. The Bananas are the future of baseball insomuch as The Bachelor is the future of dating.
The Bananas are "dumb entertainment." And that's fine. Dumb entertainment is great. It sounds categorically fun to walk into a baseball stadium for two hours and watch pretty talented athletes play a version of baseball while flanked by shockingly mobile grandmothers doing the Macarena and newborn babies competing in a high-intensity crawling race and umpires who start impulsively twerking during game breaks. Do you get any higher-order intellectual stimulation out of the experience? Unlikely. Would I enjoy it myself? Unclear. Am I confused where exactly they are finding these great baseball players with shockingly good dance moves? Absolutely. But none of these questions really matter.
The fact of the matter is the Savannah Bananas are filling up a baseball stadium night after night after night by giving people one hell of a good time. And they're getting people off their iPhones and making them excited about attending a live event again. The Savannah Bananas aren't the future of baseball, but they don't have to be. What they're doing is wildly remarkable as it is. It doesn't have to be a "revolution" to be worthwhile. Sometimes it just has to be a good Friday night.
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