OK, I saw this event on Friday night and I was going to start a thread called “The Unholy Atrocity That Is “Banana Ball””, but I guess I’ll put it here.
There is no debating that this is genius level marketing; as I told my friend “the Democrats need to hire this guy”. Wrigley Field was sold out, and most people seemed to be having a great time. I actually thought it must have been something like being a normal FM radio listener walking into a Grateful Dead show. Something was happening there, but I didn’t know what it was. (And apparently some people do literally follow them around all summer, so it kind of fits) The large majority of the crowd were decked out in official Bananas regalia. Come to think of it, also like a Dead show, almost everyone was white. The whole thing had a very “Disney adult” vibe.
I can see the appeal of a faster-paced version of baseball, which this certainly is, but they completely defeat the purpose by adding in a lot of their own dead air. There was IIRC a two hour pregame show, which I saw about half of. A lot of it was just the cheerleaders dancing (all the cheerleaders were men) with enthusiasm but without the slightest evidence of any actual dance training. This was accompanied by exhortations to “Get up and make some noise!” Then there were “audience participation” games which were the kind of thing you’d see at a low budget county fair. For example, at one point they had two fans put on grossly oversized sweatpants and attempt to catch bananas in their pants. The bananas were thrown from progressively further away, eventually from the upper deck of the stands. This bit was stretched out to over ten minutes. Another couple minutes were killed by pulling a random six year old girl from the crowd and instructing her to lead everyone in dance moves. And lots and lots of encouraging the crowd to give themselves a big hand for being great. Seriously, if you must go to this, just show up at game time.
Once the game began, it was indeed fast paced. They don’t have it in their official rules, but the pitchers acted like they were on about a 5 second clock. That’s really what makes the game move fast. All their rules changes are dumb. One in particular illustrates how unserious this activity is as a sport – a foul ball caught by a fan is an out. Can you imagine how this would work at a Red Sox-Yankees game? People would be getting maimed.
Another one: The winner isn’t determined by who scores the most total runs. Rather, you get one point for each inning in which you outscore your opponent. OK, fair play. It’s arguably a problem with baseball that sometimes a team will have a big inning and put the game almost – but not quite! – out of reach, and then the rest of the game is boring. This system eliminates that problem.
Oh yes, one other wrinkle; this doesn’t apply to the NINTH inning, in which each run scores counts as a point, so no deficit is theoretically impossible to overcome. So…they’ve just re-invented…oh my aching head.
Overall, though, it was recognizable as a baseball game and the weird rules didn’t come into play all that often. Sometimes they caught pop flies behind their backs, whatever. The only thing that prevented the game itself from being enjoyable for me was the constant loud rock music throughout the game; just the hooks of some of the worst and cheesiest songs ever. “Kung Fu Fighting” was involved and I’ll just leave it at that. Bad enough they do that between innings in the majors.
Despite it all, I can’t say I had a bad time, though I would certainly never go again of my own volition. A small handful of actually really funny things happened. The tweens I was with loved it, which did not surprise me. But why any adult would subject themselves to it mystifies me.