Banana Ball is similar to Big 3 Basketball. They are similar to another sport, but are their own thing. If you’re a sport purist, you won’t like them, but they are entertaining and fun.
Went to the Banana Ball game at Coors Field in Denver last night, and had a great time.
People keep saying it is like the Globetrotters, and I understand why, but the better analogy I kept thinking of was that it is like musical theater as compared to serious theater. If you go to Grease and are upset because the Montagues and Capulets never have dance battles, then you’ve missed the point of the show. Also, the play is not put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company, but by the Savannah Community Players.
So don’t go see Grease if you get upset by having your tragedy interrupted by musical numbers, and don’t go to a Banana Ball game if you take sports so seriously that you can’t enjoy the team doing some mid-inning line dancing.
Most of the bits really aren’t going to land when watched in a video. Some 6 year old doing dance steps on Youtube is pretty bad unless its your 6 year old. A 6 year old leading 50,000 people, including everyone around you, in a dance is fun.
Also unlike the Globetrotters, the Bananas lost. In the game we saw the Indianapolis Clowns won in a 5 or 6 round showdown. Even though the crowd was a sea of yellow, nobody seemed to care and the Clowns were cheered for their first showdown win. It wasn’t a 2-hour game, either. By the time the showdown was over it had been nearly 3 hours.
The baseball was not particularly great. Lots of errors, and it wasn’t clear if they were from trying to do trick plays, deliberately missing, or just player quality. None of the trick plays were as good as being in the same stadium (almost 20 years ago!) and watching Troy Tulowitzki turn a run scoring line drive into a double play.
During the 6th or 7th inning Kristen Bell sang a medley of Frozen and other songs, often with baseball lyrics instead of the original. No explanation was given as to why this happened.
I think you mean Westside Story but that’s a good way to describe it.
You are correct, thanks.
I saw the clip. The guy she was duetting with is Derek Klena. He has very solid Broadway credentials including a Tony nomination. Unlike most Broadway performers he also was a pitcher on the UCLA Bruins team.
I don’t know how much Broadway performers make but Savanah Bananas make a lot more than minor league players and I’m sure it will be a steady gig until he’s too old to handle it.
Thanks, I wouldn’t have remembered that name even if they had announced it. With all of the delays involved between the speed of sound, live, and scoreboard visuals, it was impossible to tell if they were lip syncing or singing live. Either way, they both sounded great, and the dance was cute.
Funniest part of the performance to me was it completely upstaged former Rocky Ryan Spilborghs, who they had just brought out to pinch hit. He promptly grounded into an out, just like old times watching the Rockies play.
Nice to see his name. I worked with his mom Essie for a few years while he was in the MLB. She was a very kind person who died from cancer way too young.
From today’s Onion:
I obviously wasn’t there but that seems really inappropriate.
It’s an article from The Onion, a parody news site. It didn’t really happen.
Fuck me. Sorry.