ANAHEIM, Calif. — On a Friday night this summer, the New York Yankees packed Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in a rematch of last year’s World Series. An hour south that same evening in Anaheim, another major-league stadium hosted a sold-out ballgame, but the contest had nothing to do with the nation’s most venerated sports league, Major League Baseball. It was between a troop of dancing ballplayers called the Savannah Bananas and a rival of their own creation, the Firefighters.

MLB officials say they view the independent Bananas not as competition but as a complement, an aid to the number of baseball and softball fans everywhere. To MLB, the Bananas are an entertainment product — not competitive with an established sport and closer to a stadium-filling concert, or a sport-adjacent show like the Harlem Globetrotters of basketball.

But Jesse Cole, the Bananas’ owner, sees what he’s creating as much more than just baseball vaudeville.

“This isn’t the Globetrotters. We’re building a sport,” Cole said. “I have Little Leagues reaching out every day that they say they want to do Banana Ball League. They don’t want to play regular baseball, their kids want to play Banana Ball. They want to have a yellow banana ball, the first ball that they pick up. It’s different. My seven-year-old kid, that’s all he does is trick plays now.”

Cole, too, says the Bananas should not be seen as rivals to MLB’s 30 owners. But his own stated ambitions — he says he wants to amass one billion fans — belie that stance. He likens the Bananas’ trajectory to that of Ultimate Fighting Championship, the mixed-martial arts competition that grew alongside the old stalwart of combat sports, boxing.

After Cole made that comparison, UFC netted a $7.7 billion deal with Paramount.

“You gotta see the whole board. Zoom out,” Cole said. “Baseball’s always going to be a great sport. I have a lot of love for it. But UFC came along and it started creating a new base of fans. I believe Banana Ball will do the same.”

As the Bananas’ high-energy act continues to draw young fans and dominate TikTok algorithms, two questions linger: how big can the phenomenon grow, and are the Bananas on a collision course with MLB?

“I think it’s great. … I don’t view it at all competitive to what we’re doing,” said Noah Garden, MLB’s deputy commissioner for business and media. “I don’t view it any different than if you were in New York, and tonight you went to a Yankee game, and you had Post Malone playing at Citi Field. Everybody that owns a stadium is looking to program all their off days with something that’s going to fill the stadium.”

Concerts, however, aren’t so similar a product.

The Bananas aren’t a threat to MLB’s existence, but they nonetheless represent something novel: in modern times, MLB owners have rarely had reason to consider whether another U.S. league might be doing some things better, nor have they had cause to wonder whether one dollar out of 100 might go to someone else’s pockets. The Bananas are selling out every major-league ballpark they walk into, not to mention college-football stadiums.

That’s fine, MLB officials say.

“To me, one’s a league and one’s an exhibition,” Garden said. The Bananas came to Southern California for one night and moved on, while the Yankees and Dodgers played three games over that same weekend.

Next year, Cole plans to add two more teams to the Bananas’ traveling circuit, upping the total to six as part of the inaugural season of what he’s named the “Banana Ball Championship League,” or BBCL. But scarcity will remain part of the Bananas’ formula, Cole acknowledged. The club’s season in 2025 is roughly one quarter the length of MLB’s 162-game marathon.

“If anybody tries to put us against (them), it’s wrong,” Cole said of MLB. “It may happen, but what I always say is, we can exist together and create fans together. … It’s a new, emerging brand that people can see as competition. But I literally don’t see it as competition.”

What is perhaps most striking in a comparison between MLB and the Bananas is the formula of fun the Bananas have unlocked. Ex-major league players often make surprise cameos. Even at a time when MLB has ridden the pitch clock and a slew of other changes to renewed success, Savannah makes attracting young viewers look easy.

To MLB, some things are simpler to achieve in Bananaland.

“They’re an entertainment product,” Garden said. “If you’re going to do a music concert, you can decide what song you’re singing every single night, and you can make it different. Every single day. What I’d say about baseball is, I think our commissioner has done an outstanding job over the last few years of making some significant changes to the game that you’re seeing the results of.”

In the decade MLB has spent under commissioner Rob Manfred, MLB’s owners have shown an ambition to buy up the sport of baseball broadly through an initiative dubbed “One Baseball.” In 2018, the league bought into the ball and glove manufacturer Rawlings. Just this May, MLB announced its stake in the new Athletes Unlimited Softball League.

Today, however, MLB doesn’t appear to be pursuing an investment in the Bananas.

“Interesting thought. … We haven’t really thought of that,” Garden said. “I think you’ll see investments from us longer term over things that are a little closer, or probably more closely aligned, with what our product is on the field.”

That’s no problem for Cole, who said that his operation isn’t for sale and that he has no investors other than himself and his wife. Cole, who wears an eccentric yellow suit and tophat to every Bananas game, fancies himself an entertainment innovator in the mold of Walt Disney or P.T. Barnum.

“I will do this until the day I die, and then I want to make sure my family keeps it going,” Cole said. “If I wanted to make a lot of money, yes, we could sell. There’s been some crazy numbers thrown at us. Crazy numbers. The thing is, if we wanted to build this to make money, we would have all the fees (on tickets). … We would have sponsors everywhere.”

In addition to his duties as owner of the Bananas, Jesse Cole takes an active role in the show. (Sean Rayford / Getty Images)

Instead, Cole says he subscribes only to the slogan, “fans first.” Cole declined to share revenues, but said they double every year.

MLB and the Bananas already have a working relationship, in no small part because of all the MLB stadiums the Bananas book. The two leagues have even discussed folding the Bananas into MLB’s annual All-Star Game festivities, on one of the July days preceding the Midsummer Classic itself. But logistics have held up the collaboration.

“The problem is, look at the All-Star Game weekend,” Garden said. “There’s just no room for it. I talk to those guys all the time, and I’m sure we’ll find more stuff to do over time together.”

Last year, Manfred made waves when he suggested a possible rule change for MLB that the Bananas already used: the Golden At-Bat, which allows a team to break its traditional batting order to use its best hitter in a key moment. An MLB owner had been particularly keen on the idea for years, according to league sources who were not authorized to speak publicly. But fans reacted poorly to the thought of it being ported to MLB, which led to Manfred backtracking.

Privately, though, MLB at the time was also concerned it had offended the Bananas. Deputy commissioner for baseball administration and legal Dan Halem, Manfred’s second-in-command, offered Savannah an apology, which was accepted, people briefed on the conversation said.

The Bananas’ growth has been so rapid since Cole founded the team for the 2016 season that they’ve had a display in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., for almost two years now.

“They have very quickly become an important part of baseball, and in a lot of ways, they are reaching a generation of baseball fans that are hard to reach,” said Josh Rawitch, the Hall of Fame’s president. “Nobody wrote in and said, ‘Hey, it’s too soon for these guys.’

“I am very curious to see where they take it, because I believe that they have the creativity to go any number of directions. And there’s really no limit to what they can do. I think they’ve shown that anybody that doubts them shouldn’t.”

To Cole, everything is part of the show. The Athletic spoke to Cole for this story for 20 minutes at Angel Stadium. The Bananas recorded the interview and Cole published their footage to his YouTube channel without notifying The Athletic of that possibility — an atypical decision in standard interactions between news media and organizations they cover, particularly when the subject matter is not contentious. It received 54,000 views.

In that conversation, Cole largely avoided specific answers about his plans to grow the Bananas, but said he wants to keep pushing the envelope, and doesn’t want fans ever to get bored.

“I don’t like that five-year question, because I think it’ll be outdated by next year, because I’ll be doing things that people would then say I wouldn’t believe you’d be doing in five years,” Cole said. “Conventional is, you build a team and you build a stadium in a market, you have 60, 80, however many games. You hope they come. For us, the model is, I want to go to fans in North Dakota, South Dakota, Canada. I want to go to fans all over. It’s hard, right? It’s extremely costly. It’s unscalable in some ways, but we find a way.”

The Bananas find players via coach and scout recommendations and through tryouts. Adam Virant, who oversees the rosters of the Bananas and their league as director of baseball operations, said the front office looks for “high-level players that are doing things that we’ve never seen on a baseball field before.”

The Bananas have developed a number of signature attractions, including players on stilts. (Jaiden Tripi / Getty Images)

Some Bananas players have taken up agents, but all playing contracts are one-year deals, Virant said. He declined to specify the pay for players, but said it was more than the minimum at the Triple A level in the affiliated minor leagues. The minor-league collective bargaining agreement calls for at least $1,225 per week.

“It’s all year to year, because we understand how challenging this environment is, and it’s not for everybody,” Virant said. “We just want to have the opportunity to be able to move people around and bring new people in.”

Unlike players in the major leagues or in the affiliated minor leagues, players for the Bananas or any of the other teams in their league are not unionized.

“It’s great to see the excitement that the Bananas are creating, and if their goal is to expand, a hat tip to all involved — on the field and off — who will benefit from delivering on that growth,” Tony Clark, head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, said in a statement.

Running the Bananas and their league, Cole acknowledged, is not the same task as running MLB. What would he do in Manfred’s shoes?

“It’s tough,” Cole said. “Having to appease the players’ union, the owners, the fans and the league office, and the partners, the broadcast partners, is an extremely hard job. I am not jealous at all, because … the only person we have to work for is the fan. It makes our job a lot easier than having to make everyone else happy.”

Savannah has been dipping its toe into national-media distribution waters, too. The Bananas last month announced that TNT Sports would carry 19 of their games on truTV and HBO Max as this season winds down.

For MLB’s part, Garden didn’t seem to think there was much the baseball establishment could take away from the Bananas.

“You never say never,” Garden said when asked if MLB players might soon be doing backflips nightly. “But MLB has a long history with embedded rules and fandom for the professional league that we operate, and I think that that has its charm.”

That leaves plenty of room for the Bananas to operate without MLB’s constraints — a world where, so far, they’ve thrived.

“What happens is, everyone kind of goes in the middle,” Cole continued. “You don’t take big risks, because you can’t take big risks, because you got all these other people that don’t want risk. … We can take any risk that we want to if we believe it’s truly best for the fan, and we’re OK with failing, because if we fail, it’s not this huge failure publicly. We just move on to the next show.”

(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Jaidin Tripi / Getty images, Macy Dicicco / Getty images)