Stop Doing What People Hate!

Jesse Cole built a baseball team from scratch into the Savannah Bananas, the hottest ticket in town. Now he has a lesson for every CEO who wants to turn a company around:

- 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 train-ing 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, thrust-ing their hips back and forth to "That's What I Like," by Bruno Mars. Alex Degen, a 19-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 that in? He thrusts right. Later, in the fourth inning, he'll hand out roses to little girls in the stands. In the seventh, h0 I rip off his shirt atop the dugout.

And as he charms and preens, he'll be just one part of a general circus atmosphere. They'll toss oversize Dolce & Banana underpants into the crowd. A Summer Santa will drive a VW Bus around the bases. The break-dancing first-base coach will bust out his moves, and the team's official, on-the-payroll high-fixing kid will high-five as many fans as possible."' was shell-shocked when I first saw the Bananas," says Degen, the pitcher, of his arrival in Savannah. "I was very skeptical. In college, baseball is serious. It took two weeks for me to realize this was fun."