Weekend in Bananaland
The Pip and I shuffle off to Buffalo
Some months back, one of the coaches on the Pip’s travel baseball team entered some kind of drawing for youth groups and won the right to buy a block of tickets to see the Savannah Bananas play this past Saturday. If you’re not familiar with the Bananas, they’re basically doing the Harlem Globetrotters thing with baseball: trick plays, choreographed silliness, the whole deal. This started back in 2016 but has really taken off in the last year or two, to the point where they’re selling out major league baseball stadiums. The game we got tickets for was at Sahlen Field in Buffalo, one of the biggest minor league stadiums around (and, weirdly, one of the handful where I’ve seen a game— way back in 1996 one of my college buddies got married in Buffalo, and we had an afternoon to kill, so went to the ballgame…).
We originally planned to take the whole family, but what with one thing and another, Kate and SteelyKid opted out, so it was just me and The Pip. We drove the old Erie Canal route Friday morning, arriving in Buffalo mid-afternoon, then went down to the waterfront to look at the big lake. We met up with some of his teammates and got dinner at Gabriel’s Gate (the recommendation of some friends from Buffalo), then went back to the hotel so the kids could rampage around. Unfortunately, The Pip is going through his second three-week stint in a hard cast (new injury, dumb story), so he couldn’t join them in the hotel pool, which didn’t do wonders for the vibes…
Saturday morning, we met up with more of the team and went a bit outside the city to see an obscure but scenic waterfall:
I had been planning to hit the Canadian side on Sunday, and to stay up top given the cast situation, but the rest of the mob was doing the Maid of the Mist thing, so we wrapped a trash bag around the cast and took the boat ride. Which really is something, though for a lot of it you can’t exactly see the falls because of all the spray.
The whole point of the trip was to see comedy baseball, though, so we headed back to the hotel after lunch to rest up, and then down to the stadium a bit more than an hour before the gate-opening time. Which is two hours before the start of the game.
Why so early? Well, because the Bananas do open seating— everything is first come, first served, with no assigned seats. This is, I suspect, something that makes a lot of sense when you’re launching a new operation, but once you’re selling out ballparks, even minor league ones, I’m not a fan. We spent an hour shoulder-to-shoulder with several thousand other people packed into a plaza in front of the gates, and then another fifteen or twenty minutes in a slightly terrifying shuffle toward the gates in a dense crowd. This wouldn’t be that big a deal if it was just me and The Pip, but we were trying to sit with a big group of families, including some really little kids, and trying to herd them all through a giant surging crowd was Not Fun.
The second problem with the experience was that the stadium services really did not have the capacity for this level of demand all at once. After we found seats (spread over several rows in the middle of a section in the lower tier but shaded by the upper deck), I went to get food. Which took north of 45 minutes, despite the fact that there were maybe 12 people in line ahead of me to get hot dogs and fries. The issue was mostly the fries— they had four 40-year-old deep fryers in the stand I went to, and it took about ten minutes to fry a batch, and maybe two to sell all of them. The fries were really good once I got them, but made the whole thing a miserable experience.
(This is not really the fault of anyone at the stadium: they probably do just fine for their core business of minor league baseball games, where even a sellout crowd is going to trickle in more slowly. This general-admission madness followed by an hour and a half delay before the start of the game means a concession rush that they just aren’t tooled up to handle because they don’t normally need to handle it. At Yankee Stadium, with a crowd three times the size of a Sahlen Field sellout, the line I joined would’ve taken maybe ten minutes to serve everyone, because they have an absolutely massive operation that’s optimized for throughput. There’s no reason to have that scale of operation at a AAA park in Buffalo, though, which leads to a real logjam on the rare occasions when they do have this kind of press.)
The smart play probably would’ve been to wait until after the game started to go in search of food— the lines were way shorter when I went out for beer later— but 1) I was starving, b) I wanted to be able to watch the actual game, and iii) staying in the seats would’ve required watching a lot of on-field entertainment that was squarely pitched at Not Me. There’s nothing wrong with that— their primary audience is really kids of The Pip’s age and below— but it’s a lot of dopey contests and circus patter.
A lot of that continues into the actual game, unfortunately. There’s a kind of relentlessness to the presentation that’s in stark contrast to normal baseball. The simplest example would be that where a typical player in a MLB or even minor-league game gets a walk-up song, the music cuts out once they get to the batter’s box. With the Bananas, the music keeps going through the whole at-bat. If you’re lucky, anyway— a lot of the time, they change songs with every pitch, which since they don’t allow batters to step out of the box gives it a very “My friend is trying to find a decent station on the car radio in an unfamiliar city” vibe if you’re Of My Certain Age.
There’s also a lot of shtick around the actual gameplay— individual at-bats designated as counting for something or another, mascot/ band hijinx, “fling stuff into the crowd” giveaways at random intervals— on a schedule that all feels optimized for the TikTok generation. Who absolutely ate it up— there were some teen girls in the row behind me who were absolutely shrieking with glee at everything— so, you know, good on their marketing team.
For me, though, it got to be A Bit Much very quickly, and about six innings in, I absolutely could not take being in the stands any more. This worked out okay because The Pip wanted a hat and had been unable to get one pre-game (there was another massive line and when the one parent who volunteered to wait for merch got to the front, they didn’t have what he wanted in the right size), so I wandered the concourse to find that, and then stood in one of the entryways for the final inning or so. Which was much more congenial, for me— I didn’t have anyone to talk to, which would’ve been nice, but between the music and the shtick, it’s hard to get a word in anyway, so that was fine. I wasn’t pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of other people, there was a bit of a breeze, and I didn’t have teen girls shrieking song lyrics right behind my head, so was in a better position to enjoy the on-field product.
Which, I should say after being pretty negative for most of this, is extremely well done. The players have real skills, and are also very well rehearsed at all the dancing and skits and whatnot. The mix of athleticism and showmanship involved is pretty impressive. Maybe the most impressive performance of the lot is the umpire, who has to dance around energetically between pitches for both teams, and still lock in to call balls and strikes. That guy has to be absolutely wiped out by the end of the game.
In a way, the Banana Ball experience, for me, was kind of the reverse of actual baseball. I generally find in-person baseball at the MLB level a more pleasant experience than baseball on TV— a lot of the TV commentary is inane, and in modern stadiums you get almost as many in-game replays as you would see at home. For the Bananas, I thought the TV product was a bit better— the game on Friday night in Buffalo was carried by ESPN, and they had it on in the sports bar across the street from the hotel where I went to watch the Yankee game (which was in a rainout for most of the time I was there…). The cameras could zoom in on the genuinely impressive trick plays, and the relentless music and chatter was necessarily muted, making it way more congenial for me.
This is very much a Me Thing, of course— I’m more than four times the age of their primary audience, and the kids in the group had a blast. The Bananas won the game (which is not as much of a given as you might think from the Globetrotters analogy), and closed it out with a really obvious bit of Buffalo fan service:
A lot of our group stuck around to get merch signed by the players, but I was absolutely Done with standing in packed public spaces— as a Person of Size, I find dense crowds incredibly unpleasant, particularly when there are small kids around— so headed back to the hotel. I told The Pip he could stay with his teammates and parents and come back with them, but he opted to come with me.
So, anyway, that was our big weekend activity. Would I do it again? Probably not in such a big group, unless they move to doing assigned seats— the general admission thing was really unpleasant, but if we had only needed to find four seats rather than 17, it would’ve been fine. And I would definitely go stand in the aisle sooner rather than later.
So, yeah, that’s this week in me being Old. If you want more for some reason, here’s a button:
And if you want to call me a geezer for not being sufficiently in the spirit of the thing, the comments will be open:
I was curious a few years ago when I first heard of the Bananas, and respect for the Coles who put everything they had on the line to make the Bananas happen. I was even intrigued by their Banana Ball rules, which originally they'd only do for one a few exhibition games I believe. But I don't know that I'm a fan of the full-on baseball circus, although happy that the Coles have found success.
A supposedly fun thing you'll never do again ...