Jesse Cole’s Savannah Bananas sold out Wrigley Field three nights running, and packing a park that seats 41,000 a game for 120,000-plus tickets total is not what a dying novelty act looks like.
“Three nights, over 120,000 fans, sold out in minutes,” Cole told Block Club Chicago. “At a traditional, iconic ballpark like this, to bring Banana Ball, it’s meaningful.”
NBC Chicago confirmed all three sellouts independently, which matters because “sold out in minutes” is exactly the kind of thing a team’s own owner would say whether or not it were true. The Bananas lost Friday’s opener to the Firefighters, 1-4, and nobody in the building seemed to care.
Strip out ticket price and the misery of rooting for a bad home team, and offer people something that’s actually trying to entertain them, and this is apparently what happens: 41,000 seats a night, gone in minutes, for a team that doesn’t even keep real score.
The Chicago Cubs didn’t just let this happen at their own ballpark. Ben Zobrist rode a bike in from the center-field bleachers and pinch-hit Friday, and Wrigley chanted “MVP” for a 2016 World Series hero reaching first on a fielder’s choice for the wrong team. Kerry Wood threw a trick pitch off the mound. David Ross got an at-bat Saturday.
Legends taking real swings in an exhibition means the organization wanted in on the bit, not just tolerated it. Wood’s mound cameo is worth watching on its own:
https://twitter.com/Josh_Frydman/status/2081155472397074534
The trick pitch was exactly as unserious as advertised, and the crowd loved it anyway. Fan Diana Tabor told the Chicago Sun-Times exactly what the tickets are actually buying: “It’s what everybody loves about baseball and then they take what everybody hates about baseball out… It’s just the fun, the dancing, the crowd engagement.” I’ve watched the Zobrist bike entrance four times now, and it’s still funnier than anything the actual Cubs infield has produced all season.
Their own roster has had a much rougher year by comparison. They’re still trying to survive a rotation that’s been in freefall all season, and even Dansby Swanson’s monster night a few weeks back didn’t generate a fraction of this noise.
None of this is subtle, either. Baseball’s own attendance conversation this year has been about pace of play, ticket prices, and whether fans still trust a home team enough to show up mid-summer. The Bananas ran a live experiment on all three variables inside Wrigley’s actual building, and the answer came back in under a minute a game.
This also isn’t new. A year before Wrigley, the Bananas sold out two nights at Rate Field, home of the White Sox, with more than 182,000 people chasing roughly 81,000 available seats. Two ballparks, two summers, same result, and that’s the kind of repeatability you build a business model around, not something you laugh off as a novelty tour.
Cole’s already talking about doing this again, floating Soldier Field as the next stop. The Bananas’ 2026 tour hits something like 75 stadiums across 45 states and is projected to clear three million fans by the time it’s done. Wrigley was a preview, not an outlier.
A guy in a yellow tuxedo just out-hustled an entire league.
