I Finally Went to a Banana Ball Game. I Was Not Expecting a Full-Scale Libidinal Craze.

Coca-Cola Park, a 10,000-person-capacity stadium nestled in the meadows of eastern Pennsylvania, is typically host to the Lehigh Valley IronPigs—the triple-A affiliates of the Philadelphia Phillies. The IronPigs are known for being one of the most successful minor league outfits in the country, regularly drawing big crowds of Keystone State diehards eager for some good old-fashioned baseball nerdery. But on a blistering Sunday afternoon in July, fans have packed the parking lot for a different reason entirely. Banana Ball—the half-baseball, half-circus sport pioneered by the Savannah Bananas—has come to town, and tickets have been sold out for weeks.

For the uninitiated, Banana Ball essentially gives baseball a Harlem Globetrotters–esque makeover. The sport blurs the lines between legitimate competition and farce-show entertainment: There are stunts, dance intermissions, and WWE-style pageantry, all of which is immaterial to who actually wins or loses. Teams wiggle through synchronized TikTok choreography, batters sing karaoke, outfielders stick the landing on backflips while catching fly balls, and runners somersault into home plate. Between innings, players undertake even more elaborate gimmicks, putting the mild theatrics of the seventh inning stretch to shame. (There is, for example, the “cougar race,” for which moms are summoned from the crowd and ordered to give piggyback rides to the players around the diamond.) Some legitimate baseball occurs in between the pomp and circumstance, but the rules have been streamlined: There's no bunting, walks have been eliminated, and games must be finished within a two-hour time limit.

In other words, Banana Ball is a spectacle, one that's become ludicrously popular. In 2025 the organizing body behind the sport—the Banana Ball Championship League—managed to sell out world-renowned major league arenas like Fenway Park and Camden Yards. The success courted big-name investors: ESPN reached a deal to air 10 Banana Ball games over the course of the summer, while simultaneously renegotiating on its contract to broadcast the MLB . And further expansion is on the horizon. The BBCL currently fields four teams: the Texas Tailgaters, the Firefighters, the Party Animals, and, of course, the Savannah Bananas. But come October, the organization will unveil two new franchises, each of which will begin on a 60-game season.

I have been baffled by Banana Ball's miraculous rise all summer, which is exactly how I found myself standing in line at the ballpark gate—determined to figure out why it's become such a phenomenon. Fortunately, two women, who consider themselves among the biggest fans of the sport, are willing to clarify. They're wearing the jerseys of the Party Animals, the perpetual rivals of the Savannah Bananas, and one of the teams set to take the diamond later this afternoon. The Party Animals, they inform me, are known for being more raucous, more dangerous, and—most relevant to their interests—more horny than the other Banana Ball rosters. The team is outfitted in tight trousers and unfastened buttons. Gold jewelry swoops low across exposed collarbones. Players climb atop the dugout, ditch their shirts, and let their muscles glist for a flutter of iPhone cameras. It's all starting to make sense: These women learned to love the Party Animals in the same way they might fall in lust with a boy band. Banana Ball, it turns out, is for the girls.

“There's a plethora of pretty faces to look at,” said Renee Smiley, who is from Atlanta and keeps a streak of Party Animals–hued magenta in her hair. She twirls around, proudly showing off the Sharpie-etched signatures of the players that cover every inch of her jersey—earned, piecemeal, through the hard work of fandom. Smiley won't tell me her age, but I get the sense that she's a decade or two older than her 25-year-old friend Alexis Williams, who accompanied her to Pennsylvania. The two women put through the TikTok comments section of one of their favorite Party Animals, Jake Lialios, a pitcher whose biceps are as thick as his thighs. The pair formed a quick bond and have been attending Banana Ball games together ever since.

Banana Ball wasn't always this thirsty. The sport's main owner, the lifelong baseball executive Jesse Cole, purchased the Savannah Bananas back in 2015, when they were just a regular old college baseball club. (To this day, the BBCL's operations are based in the team's original home, Savannah, Georgia.) In a story that has quickly become the stuff of legend, Cole wanted to bring more fans to his program and was willing to think outside the box to make that happen. So in 2018 he drew up the Banana Ball rulebook and fielded the sport's inaugural game. The Savannah Bananas were still members of a baseball ecosystem—the team played its madcap style at home games, while conforming to the traditional practices on the road. However, as the team's profile grew, Cole eventually divested Banana Ball from baseball's competitive infrastructure entirely. He expanded his fiefdom across the country, booking progressively bigger venues and minting new fans at every stop. Along the way, Cole has become a veritable sports promotion kingpin. Nobody is quite sure just how big his invention can get. (Cole declined an interview for this story.)

All that said, it wasn't Cole who imparted a dose of sexuality to the Banana Ball brand. This distinction belongs to Savanah Alaniz, who was an intern with the Bananas in her early 20s. Back in 2020, Alaniz was entrusted with growing the team's TikTok page, which at the time was stuck at just over 200 followers. The videos she chose to post, however, were not game highlights or feats of superior athleticism. Instead, Alaniz showcased the impressive body-rolling dance capabilities of the Banana Ball players, all of whom, it needs to be said here, are straight-up Ken-doll hot (kind eyes, wavy hair, perfect skin, and lean frames). It worked like a charm. Today the Bananas have 10 million followers on TikTok, while the Party Animals stand at 3 million. Watching these jocks strut, pose, and lip-synch Blackpink—to the ogling joy of thousands of comments—it's pretty clear that there is real intention behind the softer form of masculinity on display.

“I will proudly say that I was like, 'How are we going to get people to care about the content? I'm just going to post the things I want to watch on social media.' And when I was a 20-year-old college girl, that was the hot baseball players,” said Alaniz. “So, yeah, I would tell them, 'You can take your shirt off. You can dance. Let's get the girls to thirst.' And they did. That was our high-performing content in the beginning. Our audience was, like, 70 percent women and 30 percent men.”

This tracks with my experience at Coca-Cola Park. Every woman I spoke to at the game told me they had discovered Banana Ball through TikTok, and most of them said part of the appeal was all the cute boys. (“It's been so nice to meet the players. They make you feel welcome,” said Alex Smith, a twentysomething who had traveled to the arena with her mom. “And they're taking their shirts off. So there's the sex appeal too.”) The players themselves are actively adjusting to a status quo in which they've become thirsty magnets. Alaniz tells me she was dating a Banana Ball player when the sport began to take off on TikTok and was caught off guard by the One Direction–esque libidinal craze that suddenly surrounded her boyfriend. “The DMs he would get were pretty raunchy,” she said. “Those girls were ruthless.”

I asked a similar question to some of the Party Animals ambling around the ballpark before the first pitch. What are their DMs like? “I have a girlfriend that I make public,” said Garett Delano, a pitcher who recently posted an Instagram video of him crushing open a watermelon with his biceps. “So they're not too bad.” Earlier, on the playing field, another intern with the team—whose name I won't repeat because I don't want to get him in trouble—recalls a story he heard about a certain Banana Ball player sitting on a plane and replying to each one of the hellaciously thirsty DMs he'd received in the exact same way.

“It was 'Sounds like a great time, but with my travel schedule I can't really do anything like that right now,' ” the intern said, laughing. “I'm like, 'At least he responded!' ”

This is where I must admit that as a lifelong baseball fan, I've found the speed with which Banana Ball has conquered such sacred territory—as evidenced by the videos appearing in my algorithm of the Bananas and the Party Animals throwing ass in America's esteemed ballparks—a tad jarring. This is not to say I dislike the new sport so much as I've become strangely irked by its ubiquity. I'm not the only one who feels this way. Banana Ball's siege on the sanctum of baseball has earned the ire of the typical sports media cranks. Dave Portnoy, of Barstool fame, tweeted back in 2023 that he was “so fucking sick” of the Savannah Bananas, well before we reached peak saturation. Meanwhile, Greg Cote, the longtime Miami Herald columnist, called Banana Ball a “clown show” with “ridiculous antics” that are unbecoming of “adult baseball fans.” Those criticisms gesture toward the idea that baseball is sacred and Banana Ball is heresy. And, frankly, that rancor can get pretty ugly, especially on social media, where the backlash has taken a considerably darker turn.

In February, when the Savannah Bananas X account posted a video of the team dancing to “Friend Like Me,” from Aladdin , the dam broke. The feedback across the 1,200 replies was uniformly vulgar, and much of it had a distinctly chauvinistic bent. (“Pretty Fucking Gay,” wrote one commenter. “I'd literally rather watch women's softball over this,” added another. “The future of baseball is completely gay,” chimed in a third.) The Banana Ball institution hasn't officially addressed the blowback—though, in July, pitcher Andy Archer published a video about how he's received “hate and negative comments” that seem to come in all “shapes and sizes.” Those histrionics reveal a fundamental truth: A certain coalition of red-assed sports fans—one that I have to assume is largely right-leaning and almost entirely men—has keyed in on the fact that Banana Ball is especially appealing to queer and female audiences. In that sense, the Party Animals aren't a threat to baseball. They're a threat to the macho domination of the sports industry.

“It's part of this greater bro-media landscape, the idea that you and your masculinity are always under attack, and it's usually under attack from LGBTQ people or women,” said Ken Schultz, a writer at the queer sports news website OutSports who, earlier this year, penned a story about the homoeroticism inherent in the Banana Ball brand. (Of the evidence he cites, a booty-centric dance set to a remix of Rihanna's “Rude Boy” is what I find most compelling.)

“It's very easy to find something like the Bananas and Party Animals and say, 'This is coming for your baseball!' ” he continued. “That’s a basic part of the playbook.”

For now, though, the backlash consists mostly of a handful of stray trolls eager to assert their phallocratic hatred for this goofy baseball team. Mainstream bigots like Trump are not admonishing Banana Ball, nor is RFK Jr. claiming that it represents an existential threat to manhood. The team isn't leading Fox News or The Ben Shapiro Show or even Joe Rogan—and I think that's because the Bananas and the Party Animals have managed to remain stridently neutral on questions of not just politics but anything scintillating. At the game, when I asked players about Banana Ball's sizable female audience, and specifically if they thought there was anything about their craft that makes women here feel more welcomed compared with other territories in the sports industry, all of them responded with a nonanswer of conspicuous, media-trained uniformity.

“We attract families. It’s a family outing,” said Party Animals hitting coach Anthony Coromato. “This is something that's for all ages. You can be 6 or 66,” added Sean Fluke, one of the team's pitchers. “We're approachable to everyone,” asserted Delano. “Banana Ball welcomes everyone in,” said first baseman Jason Swan. It's not that they were saying anything false—there were indeed tons of young families in the audience—but I began to suspect that the sexual current running through Banana Ball was something never to be publicly acknowledged by anyone actually participating in the sport.

Its enthusiasts, of course, haven't gotten the memo, and are happily defining Banana Ball fandom in any way they see fit. The best evidence for the sport's carnal relevance might be the work of author K. Iwancio, who in March published what has to be the first romance novel about the sport, Nailed at Home Plate . The book is not officially licensed by the BBCL, and therefore it doesn't carry the branding of either the Savannah Bananas or the Party Animals. Instead, the story follows the saga of a fictional Banana Ball team called the Philly Sillys, and the budding romance between the squad's TikTok choreographer and a big league catcher. (The plot is an enemies-to-lovers situation. The catcher, demoted from the majors and suffering from a wounded ego, slowly falls in love with both Banana Ball and the woman teaching him the dances.) Nailed at Home Plate has been, by far, Iwancio's best-performing product. In fact, the novel has generated three times as much royalty money as her other eight books combined—an accomplishment she credits to the overlapping demographics of Banana Ball fans and romance novel readers.

“I'm in a lot of reader groups. And a lot of them kept saying how much they love the Bananas and wanted a romance book about them,” said Iwancio. “Because they're fun, they're cute, they're dancing. And they're goofballs. It makes sense in the romance world because that's what women are looking for in those books as well.”

Iwancio was already a baseball fan when Banana Ball entered his life, and the process of writing the book supercharged his attachment to the sport. She too was at Coca-Cola Park on the same day that I was, but Iwancio has also become an avid supporter of her hometown Philadelphia Phillies. (They have more in common than you realize because, as she notes, the Phillies field a famously handsome lineup. ) It makes all the macho anxiety over Banana Ball look totally misplaced. If a team like the Party Animals is capable of roping in a fleet of new fans—ones who were previously turned off by the MLB's stuffiness—then surely that is good for the sport as a whole.

Still, as a 34-year-old childless adult who never needed any superfluous attractions to enjoy a night out at a ballpark, I'm not totally convinced. I have no issue with the raging sex appeal of the players, but watching my first Banana Ball game, I found the ADHD nature of the sport utterly distressing. Watching the Party Animals live is a little bit like being trapped in an endless, spiraling TikTok scroll in which all of baseball's formalities have been scrapped for parts. The DJ cues up an endless blitz of 30-second song snippets that pound relentlessly during every minute of game time. The playlist follows no rhyme or reason. I heard Kendrick Lamar's “TV Off,” Pinkfong's “Baby Shark,” the theme songs from The Office and Friends , all thrown together into a confection of general-use pop culture signifiers. A Banana Ball game was happening, that much was sure, but the action was misdirected toward a cavalcade of viral-targeting artifice occurring elsewhere around the stands. Within the first couple of innings, the Party Animals wheeled a fully stocked bar onto the field, and two mixologists acted out a version of Tom Cruise's routine from Cocktail . It ravages the senses. A baseball team had blown up on social media and, in turn, had managed to summon the chaos of cyberspace into the physical plane.