The Banana’s asked one fundamental question to revive a defunct minor ball team. What do fans hate about going to a game?

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick in business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients, so here’s one of those.

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Dave Young:

Welcome back to the Empire Builders podcast. Dave Young here alongside Stephen Semple, and as you know, this is the time when we usually have Stephen whisper the topic of the podcast into my ear. But today I’m turning the table, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:

You are?

Dave Young:

Uh-huh. We’re going to talk about one that I’m sort of interested in right now.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, and I’m excited.

Dave Young:

I did tell you what it was. I mean, honestly, I will admit I told you what it was before.

Stephen Semple:

Well, we had a conversation last time I was in Austin and you mentioned this business, and I started doing a little bit of looking into it and I thought, “Wow, we should talk about this.” But since you had already had a lot of knowledge on it, I was like, “Dave, we should talk about this.”

Dave Young:

I mean, cool, huh?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah,

Dave Young:

It’s really kind of interesting.

Stephen Semple:

So let everybody know what we’re talking about.

Dave Young:

We’re talking about baseball, sort of. Sort of baseball. It’s a new form of baseball called Banana Ball.

Stephen Semple:

Just before you had told me about it, I’d heard about someone else had mentioned it to me and I thought it was pretty fascinating. But give us a background on Banana Ball.

Dave Young:

So this guy named Jesse Cole and his wife buy this summer baseball league team in Savannah, Georgia that had gone belly up, I think before maybe they were called the Sand Gnats or something like that.

Stephen Semple:

Okay, so basically it was a defunct, bankrupt out of business junior baseball team.

Dave Young:

I think the kind of league that plays summer times with college kids.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

So it came with the stadium, right?

Stephen Semple:

Okay.

Dave Young:

Whoever owns the franchise gets use of the stadium. So they spent a couple of years just trying to figure out how to make baseball more interesting.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Here you’ve got this weird little baseball team that nobody’s been able to make succeed.

Stephen Semple:

Okay, before you go any deeper, Dave, how sold out are they?

Dave Young:

Dude for the 2025 season, they’ve got more than a million people on their waiting list.

Stephen Semple:

On their waiting list.

Dave Young:

These are people that are saying, “Please, please let me buy a ticket.”

Stephen Semple:

Right, right. Think about this. Wouldn’t you love to have a baseball team that not only is sold out, you have a million people on the waiting list hoping for tickets. And this is not a major league team.

Dave Young:

This is in Savannah, Georgia in a stadium that’s just basically, it is not even fully surrounding the field.

Stephen Semple:

I just wanted people to understand the success this team is having.

Dave Young:

Here’s the really cool thing. Their success is not based on wins and losses.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

It’s based on entertaining people. This guy understands customer experience to a deep, deep level. And what he was looking at, and he’s a baseball player, he coached. Baseball flows in his blood, but he looked at it and he is like, “What are the things that people hate about baseball?” Right? And this is actually one of the little social media snippets that really got my attention was when he said, “What do your customers hate? What do your customers hate about doing business with you or doing business in your category? Find out those things and get rid of those things.”

Stephen Semple:

Right? In marketing parlance, we call that friction.

Dave Young:

Right, you get rid of the friction. So he looks at baseball, number one, what do people hate? You buy a ticket to a baseball game or a concert or anything else, and there’s tax listed on it and there’s ticketing fees listed on it. And you’re like, “Just tell me the price of the damn ticket.”

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

So he said, “We’re going to cover that. We’re going to cover the tax and we’re not going to have any fees because we’re going to put our own system in.”

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Right? So now you can buy a ticket with no fees and things like that attached, so you’re cool with that. You hate buying food at a ballpark, right? So they started, every ticket you buy was all-inclusive, all you could eat.

Stephen Semple:

Wow.

Dave Young:

So you go to the ball game and you want a hot dog here, have an extra one to take back your seat with you, right? Have a couple of hamburgers, whatever it is you want. It’s part of the ticket price. So you could take your whole family there. You know what the tickets are going to cost, you know what you’re going to spend on food, which is zero additional dollars and have a good time.

And then they started looking at what do people hate about the game? And baseball games are too unpredictable, and they may go way longer than you anticipated spending watching a baseball game.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Right? There’s extra innings. The batter always just takes a steps back out of the batter’s box right when the pitcher’s ready to pitch and then the manager goes out to the pitcher’s mound or the catcher goes out to the pitcher’s mound, and they have a little conversation. Maybe they’re going to swap out pitchers and just it’s all this time suck.

Stephen Semple:

It’s interesting because I was just looking up these guys started in 2016, and I’m not a huge baseball fan.

Dave Young:

Me either.

Stephen Semple:

But I seem to recall it was a few years ago that they changed some of the rules in baseball to sort of speed the game up.

Dave Young:

Oh, yeah, we’re getting there.

Stephen Semple:

Okay, all right.

Dave Young:

We’re getting there.

Stephen Semple:

Okay.

Dave Young:

In fact, two years ago they dropped the college baseball team. They’re like, “No, we’re not going to participate in that league anymore. We’re doing our own thing.”

Stephen Semple:

Wow.

Dave Young:

They became an independent.

Stephen Semple:

Completely independent.

Dave Young:

And they don’t play baseball anymore. They play Banana Ball, right? And there’s a difference. And there are some diehard baseball people out there that hate this. Now we also say, right, if you have detractors that are just as vocal as your biggest fans, you’re doing something right.

Stephen Semple:

You are actually. Yeah.

Dave Young:

Right? And so the kind of baseball nerds that sit in the stands and keep score on their own scorecard or watch TV, those are the baseball nuts that love the game for the statistical relevance and the order and the beauty of the numbers, right?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Young:

And the rest of us are like, “I just want to see a fun game.”

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Right? I want to go out to the ballpark. I want to have a good time. I want to forget my troubles. I don’t want to sit there and watch some guy do practice swings and step out. And I’m doing this all from memory. They created the rules of Banana Ball, and Banana Ball is just played a little bit differently so they have a strict time limit.

Stephen Semple:

So going back to your whole thing, what do people hate? One of the things they don’t like is the unpredictability of when it starts and when it ends. They want it to be more like a movie. Here’s when it starts. Here’s where it ends. Okay.

Dave Young:

If I go to a baseball game and it goes into extra innings, right, I may be there for three, three and a half hours.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

You don’t know. So these guys put a time limit. If the game starts at seven, it’s going to be done by nine.

Stephen Semple:

Right, so it starts at seven ends at nine, done. Okay.

Dave Young:

No extra innings. They have their own means of breaking ties and things like that, but also, runs scored is not the metric that they use to determine who’s going to win the game. It’s points. It’s almost like match play in golf.

Stephen Semple:

Right, okay.

Dave Young:

So you win an inning based on having more points than the other side, and the points are scored by runs. They’re also scored by things like trick plays, so for example, you’re in the outfield and somebody pops a nice fly ball out, and you catch the ball while you’re doing a back flip.

Stephen Semple:

That’s extra points.

Dave Young:

So you’re in the air, you’re doing a back flip and you catch the ball, you get trick play points. And that adds to the cumulative. I haven’t quite figured out the whole score keeping thing, but there’s an incentive to do that and it doesn’t always go well. These guys, they’re all good baseball players, but they’re not major league baseball players. Some of them have several years of minor league experience. They’re all athletes that play baseball and are good entertainers.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Right? So think Cirque du Soleil more than think Major League Baseball.

Stephen Semple:

Well, what came to mind to me is we’ve seen this before, and this is the Harlem Globetrotters.

Dave Young:

Oh, so Jesse Cole, the guy that started this, appreciates the comparison, but he also rejects it for a couple of reasons. So the Harlem Globetrotters, anybody that ever went to a Harlem Globetrotters game, man, it was like the circus coming to town. The circus shows up and you buy your tickets, you go into the stadium or the arena and the Globetrotters play against their captive loser team, the Washington Generals or whatever. I think it was the Generals, right? They had this team that traveled with them that always just got the snot kicked out of them by the Globetrotters because the Globetrotters are the stars.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

And what Jesse Cole did is for the first season or two they were playing, they would just divide the team up into a yellow squad and a green squad. But in the last couple of years, they actually started another team.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, wow. Okay.

Dave Young:

So they have a team called the Party Animals. And so when you go to a Banana Ball game, they play the Party Animals and you don’t know who’s going to win. They’re pretty evenly divided.

Stephen Semple:

So it’s a real competition?

Dave Young:

It’s a real competition.

Stephen Semple:

That’s the difference. Okay.

Dave Young:

And the players don’t change teams.

Stephen Semple:

Right, okay.

Dave Young:

The Bananas have their own team and the Party Animals have their own team, and the recruitment process is separate for each team.

Stephen Semple:

Right, interesting.

Dave Young:

For the coming year, I’m not sure if it’s happening in 2025, I think they’ve got two more teams coming on board for 2025. I’ll get to what their 2025 plan is, but there’s going to be a Texas Tailgaters team, and I forget the fourth team, but no, these guys play a straight-up ball game at every game.

So you’re not just watching the Savannah Bananas showing off, right? That’s sort of the gist of Harlem Globetrotters was you’re going to see Curly and Meadowlark Lemon and these guys are going to do their thing and they’ve got to have these not so good players to play against.

Stephen Semple:

One of my favorite rules that they added, I looked up a little tiny bit of this, but if a fan catches the foul ball, it’s an out. I love that.

Dave Young:

So this is really cool. And it’s an effort to speed up play.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

Right? So it’s not just to foul the ball. No, you’re out. If a fan catches the ball, sorry, buddy, you’re out. And they celebrate it, right? They’ll actually bring the fan down onto the field.

Stephen Semple:

That’s cool.

Dave Young:

And it also, when you’ve got two competing teams, you have to make a decision. Are you going to catch the ball and make your batter out?

Stephen Semple:

Right. If it’s the team I’m rooting for and a ball comes right to me, what do I do?

Dave Young:

Swat it to the ground, man? Another thing that they do that speeds up plays, you can’t have a conference on the mound. You can’t send the manager out. You can’t send the catcher out. You can change the pitcher, but you can’t just go out there and have a little chat out on the pitcher’s mound.

And to speed up the batting, if the batter steps out of the box, he’s out. Here’s the really funny one, if you bunt, if you bunt, you’re not just out, you’re ejected from the game. And I think sometimes maybe they do that just to have the ref, you’re out of here, right? He’s doing the whole arm pointing out of the stadium.

Stephen Semple:

So what I’m understanding here is what they did, and I love how you put it because we often to talk about friction. And I think it’s a poor word. I don’t think everybody understands it.

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

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Dave Young:

Let’s pick up our story where we left off. And trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.

Stephen Semple:

So it seems like the first iteration was, and I love how you put it because we often talk about friction. And I think it’s a poor word because I don’t think everybody understands it.

Dave Young:

It’s hard to understand.

Stephen Semple:

But this whole idea of what do people not like? And let’s eliminate those things. So what do we not like?

Dave Young:

Yes.

Stephen Semple:

We don’t like the fact we don’t know when the game is going to end. We don’t like the fact that we don’t know how much it’s going to cost us because there’s going to be concessions and all those other things, especially if you’ve got a family. We don’t like all these little extra charges that are on the ticket.

So iteration number one is get rid of all that crap, which I really admire them for, especially the concession one, because what I’m going to tell you is that’s really bold.

Dave Young:

Oh, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

So that’s awesome. But then it sounds like what you’re saying to me is they did a next iteration and the next iteration on it was, let’s now look at the game.

Dave Young:

The game itself, yeah.

Stephen Semple:

The game itself, and eliminate all the things that people don’t like about the game. Plus add extra entertaining factors to it.

Dave Young:

Add extra things. So their philosophy is, it’s really simple, it’s called Fans First. And in fact, Jesse Cole wrote a book, I just finished the audiobook last week, and it’s called Fans First. And it’s a great listen. I really enjoyed it. And so when you start eliminating the things that people hate about the game of baseball and want to make it fun, I mean, if you’ve ever been to a Cirque du Soleil, there’s something going on all the time.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, absolutely.

Dave Young:

And there’s something going on before the game starts, right? So these guys have a pregame. There’s entertainment happening from the moment you walk into the ballpark till the time the last inning or whatever is over. And it ranges from things like almost every batter has their own walkout music or sometimes a walkout celebration. Right? Some of them have a marching band that brings them out to the plate.

Stephen Semple:

Wow, that’s fun.

Dave Young:

The referees do tricks. They’ll do a back flip while they’re calling you safe or out.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

The referee behind home plate is this sort of big heavy guy, and he’ll be twerking while the music’s playing and the pitcher’s going. Batters can steal first.

Stephen Semple:

Okay. Yeah.

Dave Young:

This is baseball. Batters can steal first base. Anytime you think you have a pitch goes wild. And the catcher’s got to run after it and chase it, you can take off for first and steal first. And in fact, you can’t walk. There’s no walks in this game. So ball four, you take off for first, and now you’re a runner, but you’re live. And the only way they can get you out is the ball has to be handled by all seven of the fielders that aren’t the pitcher and the catcher, all right? So they have to throw to the right field, the center field, the left field, third base shortstop, second base. All seven of them have to touch the ball before they can make a play on the runner. So if you can get to second base before they’ve thrown to everybody, you can get to second on a walk.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

It’s pretty interesting to watch. They all start running towards second base, right? So they don’t have very-

Stephen Semple:

They would practice that. Yeah. They would practice.

Dave Young:

Yeah, they don’t have very far to throw the ball. But you’re almost guaranteed first, just as if it were walk. But you have the chance of making it further. And there’s an entertainment aspect to watching the team throw the ball around to see. If one of them makes a bad throw-

Stephen Semple:

That’s it.

Dave Young:

… and someone doesn’t catch it, right, you’re going to have an extra base. One of the players on the Bananas is a guy named Stilt, and he plays the entire game on six foot stilts.

Stephen Semple:

Wow. Okay.

Dave Young:

He pitches. He bats. It’s nuts.

Stephen Semple:

And so here’s the interesting thing about all this is, and I find it fascinating and I’m going to have to look more into this team, is that here you had a failed junior team. And let’s face it, junior teams, there’s a challenge in every sport to have junior teams making money. He just put the rules right on its head from the standpoint of at its heart, this is entertainment. And yeah, what he’s rejected is this whole idea of my job is to be a farm team for the major leagues.

Dave Young:

Yeah. Well, I don’t think these guys ever were.

Stephen Semple:

Right. Yeah, they’re one of-

Dave Young:

They’re not controlled by-

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

They had a million people on their waiting lists when they were just still in Savannah. And then two summers ago they did their first world tour and they played one weekend game, a couple of games in Mobile, Alabama, filled a stadium there for two games, okay? And then this past summer they played at five or six other places besides Savannah, Major League ball fields, and filled them.

Stephen Semple:

Right, so big fields. That’s incredible.

Dave Young:

Big fields. They announced their schedule for 2025, two new teams. So the games will be sort of round-robin between these four teams. Stephen, they’re going to play in 30 Major League stadiums in 2025.

Stephen Semple:

Wow. That’s incredible.

Dave Young:

And they’ve got a waiting list that will sell all of them out. And one of the places they’re going to play is Clemson University’s football field.

Stephen Semple:

That’s a big field.

Dave Young:

Which holds like 90,000.

Stephen Semple:

That’s incredible.

Dave Young:

And they’re going to turn that into a baseball diamond somehow. They’re going to put nets up. And-

Stephen Semple:

So we already know what the lesson is here, which is both this thinking differently, leaning into the entertainment, everything else. And there’s the book that you recommended people should read that you said is fascinating. But to wrap things up, I think you had also mentioned that you’re thinking about doing a course at the academy on this.

Dave Young:

Yeah, it’s going to be next spring sometime. I don’t have the dates nailed down yet, but I’m going to do a two-day class on Banana Ball.

Stephen Semple:

That fabulous.

Dave Young:

And basically, I mean, I can tell you the outline of it right now is we’re going to use Jesse Cole’s book as our textbook, and we are going to just do some lessons and workshop some ideas for how do you do in your business, whatever your business is, right? Maybe you’re an acupuncturist, maybe you’re a plumber, but how do you get rid of the things that people hate and start thinking about your customers as your fans and do more of what they love and be more entertaining in everything that you do?

Stephen Semple:

You know what? Sign me up. I’m going to be there for that class,

Dave Young:

Okay. By the way. Go to go savannabananas.com and get on their ticket list. Here’s the thing, one, you’re on the list for one stadium. You have to pick which town you want a ticket for and put your phone number in, and you’re only allowed to be on there once.

Stephen Semple:

Wow. That’s cool.

Dave Young:

So they’re playing two games, one in San Antonio and one in Round Rock just north of Austin next year. So I’m excited about it. Like we said, I’m not a huge baseball fan, but I am a fan of somebody taking something like baseball and flipping it on its head. Again, diehard baseball fans don’t like this, but they turned it into a circus. The circus is coming to town.

Stephen Semple:

I love it.

Dave Young:

And Jesse Cole is the new P.T. Barnum.

Stephen Semple:

So I have to now take the Dave one. Thank you for sharing this story with us, Dave.

Dave Young:

As you can tell, I’m kind of excited about this, so-

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, yeah. And hey, people should go check out periodically, wizardacademy.org, watch for this course. I’m going to be there. It’ll be fun.

Dave Young:

Get on our newsletter list.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

Create a free little account on wizardacademy.org, and that way you’ll get our emails and when we announce the dates of this class, hopefully by the time this podcast airs, the dates will be.

Stephen Semple:

That’d be awesome. That’d be awesome.

Dave Young:

All right.

Stephen Semple:

All right, super. Thanks David.

Dave Young:

Thank you, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:

All right.

Dave Young:

Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts.

And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute empire building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.