Customer Service STOP DOING WHAT PEOPLE HATE

That’s the philosophy Jesse Cole used to build the Savannah Bananas, an unusually popular (and weird) baseball team. And it can work for any business.

- JENNIFER MILLER

Baseball is a game of tradition, and Grayson Stadium is as traditional as they come. The Savannah venue was built in 1926, back when game-day radio broadcasts were a new thing. The Boston Red Sox held spring training here, leading Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Jackie Robinson to round its bases. For three decades, a local high school also took Grayson’s field for its annual Thanksgiving Day game against a military academy. And between 1984 and 2015, it was home to a minor league team called the Sand Gnats. This was all baseball in its classic form— orderly and staid, romanticized by purists.

Now? Things are a little different.

It’s the bottom of the second inning at Grayson Stadium on a muggy midsummer night this past August, and baseball is briefly on pause. The local team is now called the Savannah Bananas, and its four pitchers are lined up along the first-base line in their bright yellow uniforms, thrusting their hips back and forth to “That’s What I Like,” by Bruno Mars. Alex Degen, an 18-year-old pitcher from the University of Kentucky, is really getting into it. I got a condo in Manhattan. Degen thrusts left. Baby girl, what’s hatnin’? He thrusts right. Later, in the fourth inning, he’ll hand out roses to little girls in the stands. In the seventh, he’ll rip off his shirt atop the dugout.