To inherit a game, serve the crowd its keepers forgot. To serve the crowd, cut the boring parts.
Four times, strangers have asked whether my hat is a Savannah Bananas reference. It isn’t. Now that I know what they are, I wish it were.
A month ago, Partner told me I’d like the Savannah Bananas. The recommendation sat on my to-do list (read: “email inbox”) until this morning, when I finally read up. I am hooked. At least on the concept.
Two decades ago, my father told me he didn’t get the appeal of e-sports. I asked whether he got the appeal of regular sports. He did. So I asked: when you watch football on TV, how do you know those are real people? If they swapped every player for a digital avatar, how would you know?
Professional sports is entertainment. The money comes from the people watching, not the people playing. Say that out loud, and a lot of baseball starts to look indefensible. (Partner thinks I should henceforth refer to old baseball as “indefensi-ball”. I like the joke, but fear readers would find it intolera-ball.)
The Savannah Bananas play Banana Ball, which is baseball, except someone took the rulebook and asked, of every slow part, Who is this for? A walk is the most boring thing in the sport: four boring balls, a slow and boring trot to first, a predictable outcome, nothing to see. So Banana Ball has no walks. Ball four starts a sprint, where the batter runs as far around the bases as he can while every fielder but the pitcher handles the ball in turn. The dullest outcome in baseball became a footrace.
The rest rhymes. No mound visits. No stepping out of the box. A 2-hour clock, so the game can’t sprawl. Catch a foul ball in the stands and the batter is out, which turns the crowd into a tenth defender. One guy plays on stilts (Dakota Albritton). Another bats in a cape (Reese Alexiades). I’m surprised the players still go by their own names.
The cape doesn’t help him play baseball better. It does help him play banana ball better.
Scoring changed too. Win an inning (i.e. score the most runs in it), and you get a point. One point per inning, like sets in tennis. My grandfather leaves every baseball game before the 9th “to beat the traffic.” He couldn’t pull that in banana ball, because in the final inning every run is its own point, leaving every banana ball game to a dramatic finish. He would stay.
One detail sold me. This scoring system means the home team has an obvious edge: batting last every inning, it only has to hit until its ahead by one run. (Baseball fans would notice this as a host of walk-off opportunities.) I noticed that and assumed it was a flaw. But they even invented a rule for it! It’s called the Equalizer Point. If the visiting team pulls off more trick plays than the home team by the 8th (a behind-the-back toss for an out, a backflip catch, popping the ball off your glove and into your bare hand for a catch), the visitors get a free point before the last inning. The home team’s structural advantage, paid back to the road team in degree of difficulty. Whoever built this spends their showers thinking about the same fairness questions a real league does. They just answer them in the currency of the show. Because this league is just as real as Major League Baseball.
Even the charity is a pun: the team’s nonprofit, Bananas Foster, supports foster kids. It’s a real charity. And also a pun. It’s bits all the way down!
You could file all of this under parody, and parody has a ceiling. It works only while you remember the original, so it can never outgrow the thing it mocks. But the Bananas aren’t mocking baseball. They kept the bones (a pitcher, a batter, a diamond, innings) and rebuilt the rest out of love. That is what an heir does.
Heirs don’t stay capped by the thing they came from. They inherit it. Rome spent the better part of 3 centuries feeding Christians to lions; then, in the year 380, the empire made Christianity its official religion, and the church went on to inherit Rome’s whole apparatus: its language, its hierarchy, its capital, even the old chief priest’s title, Pontifex Maximus, which the Pope still carries. The offshoot outlived the host.
Games run the same play on a faster clock. Cricket already did it. A Test match can last 5 days, and the purists love every hour, but a stripped-down, made-for-TV format called T20 showed up and became the sport’s commercial engine, the version with the crowds and the money. Later this week, I’m attending the Rugby 7s world championship. I’ve only been to one match of full rugby (15 per side) – never again! – but the 20-minute, seven-person format has made me a diehard fan.
In 2023 Major League Baseball, the incumbent itself, gave itself a pitch clock. Games got 24 minutes shorter, attendance crossed 70 million for the first time since 2017, and ratings rose for the first time since 2012. Banana ball has had a game clock since 2020. (It started in 2018.) That is what the early innings of a succession look like.
The mechanism is always the same. A game gets, well, gamed to the point where it’s no fun anymore. It calcifies. It gets boring to watch, which is fatal, because the watching is what pays. Then someone arrives who treats fun as an engineering problem, and the crowd starts to drift his way, and the money follows the crowd. I’ve made this argument at the scale of a sandwich shop. The Bananas are making it at the scale of America’s Pastime.
You could call the Bananas a parasite. They feed on a host they need alive; half the jokes only work if you know the real game. (“What counts as a trick play?” requires a frame of reference.) Sure. But a parasite that devours its host and moves into the empty niche is just evolution running on schedule. We mammals also once lived in burrows, waiting out the dinosaurs. (As a PhD in biology, Partner does not support this analogy.)
Give Banana Ball 30 years and it will have its own record book, its own purists, its own slow sacred stretches no one is allowed to touch, maybe even its own children’s rec and traveling teams, and some new weirdo will turn up to strip it for parts. Christianity inherited Rome, then spent centuries hardening into the thing Luther showed up to protest. Every heir becomes an incumbent. Every incumbent grows an heir.
None of this works unless there’s nothing sacred underneath, and there isn’t. No essence of baseball is being betrayed, because there is no essence of baseball, the same way (as I’ve argued before) there is no essence of golf. “Real baseball” is just the version that happened to harden before you were born. Strip it down, hand it back to the crowd, and the purists will call it desecration. It’s only the next version.
Catholics took 3 centuries to get from the lions to the leadership. Baseball is only up to the pitch clock. The new game is less competitive than the old one. It is also, at last, worth watching to the end. Even my grandfather would accept the traffic.
Julian Wise 