Toby Corriston
Jesse Cole, often seen in his yellow tuxedo, is the founder and creative mind behind Banana Ball.
After a spectacle against Clemson baseball at Doug Kingsmore Stadium last November, the Savannah Bananas are set to play in front of their largest crowd yet when they return to the Upstate to play in Memorial Stadium this weekend.
Just hours after tickets went on sale, the nearly 82,000 seats in Memorial Stadium were sold out as fans flocked to purchase tickets for their chance to see the Savannah Bananas. With the game just days away, there are some stars who fans should know more about before the historic day.
Measuring in at 10-foot-9, Dakota Albritton is the tallest player in Banana Ball. Better known as “Stilts,” Albritton lives up to his nickname in the literal sense that he plays the game on stilts.
That’s right, Stilts does it all. He bats, pitches and runs, all while standing at nearly 11 feet tall wearing stilts.
“I played baseball my whole life, and the stilts, I learned how to do that when I was 10 years old,” Stilts told The Tiger. “I was a weird kid with weird talents. I picked them up and they came completely natural to me.”
Walking on stilts is difficult enough, but playing Banana Ball on them? That is surely not an easy task, right?
“I’m around 200 games in with the Bananas, and falling, I don’t normally have that word in my dictionary,” he said. “I have to say, running the bases is probably the harder part of my job, and honestly, the most dangerous part of my job.”
His job just to stay upright is hard enough, but Stilts is not the only player whose job is made more difficult by his being nearly 11 feet in the air.
The pitchers must adjust to his completely different strike zone when he goes up to bat.
“It’s hard for them guys? I don’t know, I ain’t ever pitched to myself,” Stilts joked. “I was fortunate enough this year, I only got hit twice, but the year prior to that I got hit multiple times.”
With a player like Stilts, surely, he is the most unique player on the team, right? Well, think again, because the Bananas have a player who holds multiple world records.
“I balance a lot of stuff on my face,” Alex “Ziggy” Ziegler said. “I once did a baseball bat for an hour and a half, and I did a baseball hat on my nose for 15 minutes. A lot of other ones are long-distance world records, like longest cornhole shot, 125 feet.”
Ziggy will balance almost anything on his face during a Banana Ball game. He has balanced bananas, baseball bats and even ladders. But how does someone even learn that they can do all this anyway?
“I started doing the balancing stuff when I was 12 years old, because my dad was my baseball coach growing up, and for some reason, he was always balancing a baseball bat on his head,” Ziggy said. “I was like ‘Dad, why do you do that?’ and he’s like ‘try it,’ and I just never stopped doing it.”
When the chance came for Ziggy to join the Bananas, he was ready. The two avenues he wanted to pursue growing up had found a way to merge in Banana Ball.
“Ever since I was younger, I wanted to be a professional baseball player or in entertainment,” he said. “As soon as the Bananas reached out to me, that put me in my element, and I just want to be here as long as possible because I’m having a blast.”
The Savannah Bananas are unique, as they are a team full of fun and entertaining players. However, none of what the Bananas do would have been possible without the vision of one man in a yellow tuxedo.
Jesse Cole is the owner of the team and the founder of Banana Ball. Cole had a vision with the Bananas: to create an entertaining atmosphere for people to enjoy baseball and see something they could not see anywhere else.
“81,000 fans watching Banana Ball is going to be electric,” Cole said. “We always love doing things that people have never done before. We love experimenting, trying things and testing things, and saying, ‘How can we create an atmosphere that’s truly special?’ And that’s what I think Memorial Stadium in Death Valley is going to be.”
In just under five years since the first official game, Banana Ball has grown at a rapid pace. Cole says he could never have imagined how big the sport would become in such a short amount of time.
“We’re playing in front of two million fans this year and 17 Major League stadiums, three NFL stadiums and one of the biggest college football stadiums,” he said. “We dream big, we have a big vision, but then we focus relentlessly on the details and the attention that matters, and that’s every fan that walks in our gates. It’s special, selling and going from two tickets to two million fans. You would never imagine that.”
From unique players to their imaginative owner, the Savannah Bananas are truly special. When they play in Memorial Stadium this weekend, it will be an unforgettable experience for the over 81,000 fans in attendance.
After all, that’s what Banana Ball is all about.