Veal Oscar?
The Bananas aren’t minor league, they are a totally different game called “banana ball” which is very similar to baseball, but different enough to confuse a baseball fan who isn’t familiar. This page has a lot of the different rules:
https://banana-ball.fandom.com/wiki/The_rules_of_Banana_Ball
“Trick plays” are no joke. They do things like throw the ball while performing a flip, or catch the ball behind their back. They also do synchronized dances in the middle of play. They even have an umpire that twerks and does pop lock dancing between pitches.
It’s still an athletic competition but with a bigger emphasis on wacky fun. I especially love the guy who bats and runs the bases on stilts.
OK, if the game is “Banana Ball”, and Savannah’s team specifically is called the “Bananas”, whom do they play against? How many other banana-teams are there, and what are they called?
Yes, not too seriously at all. But more seriously than the wacky banana crew just above.
For years one of the local minor league Single-A ball clubs here in SoFL has been the West Palm Beach Cardinals. Who are, unsurprisingly, a farm club for the MLB St. Louis Cardinals.
Management decided they needed a rebranding, something to make them sound more like Florida locals and less like northern carpetbaggers. So this very day is the opening game for the newly minted Palm Beach Frozen Iguanas. It doesn’t get much more Florida than that.
It’s not quite that cut and dried though. They’re still the Cardinals except for a few games sponsored by a local iguana abatement (pest removal) company. For those games only they adopt their superhero alternate identity as the Frozen Iguanas. Different team colors, logos, mascots, uniforms, etc. The whole branding schmear.
Given that baseball is a game of speed & quick moves while frozen iguanas are alive but almost totally immobilized that’s not the most auspicious team name they might have come up with. But they are very easy for the iguana abatement people to catch in that state. Just walk up, pick them up, and put them in your sack.
Which suggests that if the mild mannered Cardinals by day can line up a few more partial-season sponsors, they soon may have more secret identities by night than the whole MCU.
And there’s something else I learned. I knew that iguanas were found in Florida, but I didn’t realize that they were so common as to be pests who need specialized services to remove.
They’re an invasive species to Florida. So the eco-purists would like to see them all gone. Most folks think they’re just one more example of how humans have utterly altered Florida; some good, some bad, but irredeemably altered so why bother?
The critters themselves are utterly harmless. I think they’re sorta charming looking by reptilian standards, but many folks think they’re butt-ugly and some people are downright creeped out / frightened by them. 4-footers are everywhere and you see the occasional almost 6-footer.
They do however shit profusely and seem to prefer hard surfaces like walkways over nearby lawns. So if you have a group move into your backyard, they’ll be leaving you reminders of their presence. Lots of them.
The other teams are:
Texas Tailgaters
Indianapolis Clowns
The Party Animals
Loco Beach Coconuts
The Firefighters
The Clowns aren’t actually based in Indy (to my chagrin, though they will play one weekend here), but the Tailgaters do play mostly in Texas. They’re all pretty much barnstorming teams, though there are a lot of games in Savannah.