The barnstorming organization is generating more than $100 million in revenue—but its yellow-tuxedo-wearing owner, Jesse Cole, is more concerned with chasing a billion fans than a billion-dollar valuation.
Inside Yankee Stadium on a warm September night, Savannah Bananas owner Jesse Cole takes the field in front of a rapt crowd of 49,000. It’s time for the First Peel, a team tradition akin to Groundhog Day in which a young fan bites into a banana to predict the team’s fortune. If the fruit is fresh, it’s a sign of a promising night ahead. If it’s rotten, there could be trouble.
Dressed in his signature yellow tuxedo and top hat, Cole calls to Split—the team’s mascot, a towering banana—to approach with a yellow suitcase and removes a single banana to hand to a 3-year-old girl named Ellie. The tension builds in the sold-out stands as she takes a bite and chews before, finally, she yells, “Good!” The stadium erupts, and white smoke shoots up from the dugouts as Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration” blasts over the loudspeakers.
Of course, the team’s success has little to do with the ripeness of fruit. That responsibility rests with the 41-year-old Cole, who founded the operation in 2015 and has cultivated the Bananas into the most famous barnstorming outfit in baseball.
“We’ve got to make this the greatest show, the greatest experience possible,” he says. “That’s what I’m obsessed with.”
Cole’s passion is paying off. In recent years, the Bananas have captivated audiences across the U.S with a revved-up version of the sport they call Banana Ball, trading out the slow pace of a traditional baseball game for a steady stream of trick plays and gimmicks—outfielders backflipping as they catch fly balls, a pitcher toeing the mound on stilts, choreographed dance breaks and a twerking umpire. Hitters can’t step out of the batter’s box, which keeps the action moving, and games have a two-hour time limit—just long enough to cram in a few surprise appearances from celebrities and musical acts, including legendary New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and the boy band Big Time Rush on this night in September. If a fan catches a foul ball, it’s an out, and bunting is forbidden because, as the rules explicitly state, “bunting sucks.”
Fans seemingly can’t get enough. With nine games left on their 2025 schedule—all sold out—more than 2.2 million people this year have bought tickets to see the Bananas and three rival teams also owned and operated by Cole: the Party Animals, the Firefighters and the Texas Tailgaters. That attendance is more than double last year’s, and quadruple 2023’s, and the booming demand has helped Cole keep upping the ante. This edition of the Banana Ball World Tour, spanning 115 dates for the four teams, traveled to 40 cities, with stops at 17 Major League Baseball ballparks and three NFL stadiums. An April game at Clemson University’s Memorial Stadium drew a crowd of 81,000.
And the Bananas may be even more popular online. With 21.5 million followers across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube, the team has a larger social audience than any MLB franchise, according to marketing agency Two Circles. “The NFL always dominates, but what the Savannah Bananas have done, especially in digital, to become such a strong presence is nothing short of remarkable,” says Andrew Carter, a Two Circles executive.
As a result, the Bananas have become a cash-generating machine. Forbes estimates the four-team organization will post more than $100 million in revenue this year. It will also turn a profit—particularly notable because 11 MLB clubs, including the New York Mets and Yankees, operated at a loss last season (albeit with much more revenue, stretching from $257 million to $728 million).
It’s difficult to translate those financials into a valuation because there are so few comparables for a sports team that in some ways more closely resembles a circus, but based on the revenue multiples of franchises that have been sold in MLB and the minor leagues, Forbes estimates the Bananas organization is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million—about half the $1.05 billion valuation of the Miami Marlins, the least valuable major league team. Cole and his wife, Emily, own 100% of the enterprise through a company called Fans First Entertainment.
Even with those eye-popping numbers, though, the Bananas’ business could be bigger. Ticket prices are fixed in a range of $35 to $60, with no additional fees or taxes. Merchandise sales include free shipping, and because the Bananas are generally renting out venues a couple of nights at a time, rather than playing in their own permanent park, they have no in-stadium sponsorships to build out a list of partnerships that cover little more than players’ equipment and jerseys. Every game is also available to watch on YouTube, without a paid subscription.
A Full Dance Card: With their choreography helping attract a social following of 21.5 million, the Bananas and their three rival teams have sold out 115 games this year. They currently have a waiting list of 3.5 million.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Yet Cole says he isn’t the slightest bit concerned he’s leaving millions of dollars on the table.
“I never, ever think, ‘How can we bring in more money?’” he says. “The north star is always: ‘How can we create more fans?’ If you create more fans, the money takes care of itself.”
Cole took on that fan-first mentality long before he donned the yellow tuxedo, laying the groundwork for the Bananas during his first stint in a baseball team’s front office as the general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies. When Cole joined in 2008, the North Carolina-based collegiate summer team had $268 in its bank account, was losing more than $100,000 per year and couldn’t afford to pay him for the first few months. Cole doubled revenue to about $250,000 the following season and spent the next several years “trying to make the show a little bit better,” with gimmicks like beauty pageants for grandmothers and promotions like “Dig to China Night” and “Flatulent Fun Night.”
When the minor league Savannah Sand Gnats—the New York Mets’ Class A affiliate—relocated to South Carolina in 2015, Cole and his wife leapt at the opportunity to take their place in the city and start a team from scratch. The Bananas, named by a fan vote, became the newest member of the Coastal Plain League, a summer competition for college players. But they almost never took the field. The Coles racked up $1.8 million in debt buying the team, and they had to sell their house and drain their savings to keep the organization afloat.
Stressful as it might have been, it didn’t take them long to see a return on their investment: The Bananas sold out their first game in 2016 and quickly became profitable.
Although the Bananas won three CPL championships in six years, Cole saw his team’s future outside traditional baseball. In 2018, in addition to competitive league play, the club started playing exhibitions using the Banana Ball format. Two years later, the Coles created a rival team, the Party Animals—just as the Washington Generals serve as the foil to basketball’s most storied barnstorming squad, the Harlem Globetrotters.
Embarking in 2021 on an inaugural “One City World Tour”—a tongue-in-cheek name, highlighting the fact that the entire “tour” was a pair of games in Mobile, Alabama—the Bananas drew more than 7,000 fans across two sold-out nights. When the 2022 CPL season ended, Cole withdrew the outfit from the league to tour full time.
The decision couldn’t have turned out better. Larry Freedman, who now serves as co-president of Major League Soccer’s LAFC but previously spent more than a decade overseeing five to eight minor league clubs for Mandalay Baseball Properties, recalls that the top teams under his purview generated roughly $14 million annually. By comparison, after expanding their tour to more than 80 games in 2023, the Bananas topped $20 million, according to Forbes estimates. A year later, their revenue crossed $45 million.
That sort of success has hardly been a motivator for Cole, who has been adamant about keeping the experience affordable for fans. Tickets cost $35 at minor league ballparks and at the Bananas’ sometimes home, Grayson Stadium in Savannah, where food and soft drinks are also included. At MLB, NFL and other big venues, the Bananas’ average ticket price falls somewhere between $45 and $50. There’s also a premium offering available to 300 fans that can cost as much as $125—still a far cry from MLB teams’ premium clubs and front-row seats, which can run into the thousands.
Thus far, Cole has also resisted tapping into arguably the two most crucial revenue streams for today’s major professional sports teams and leagues: media rights and sponsorships. Although he has signed deals with networks including ESPN, the CW and Roku Sports Channel, Cole’s insistence on keeping the arrangements non-exclusive has severely capped the potential income. Meanwhile, the Bananas have invested millions into producing their own broadcasts on their free-to-stream YouTube channel, which has attracted 16 million views for games in 2025, double 2024’s viewership.
And on the sponsorship side, the organization has just five partners: Bodyarmor, Dunkin’, EvoShield, Louisville Slugger and Wilson Sporting Goods. “I don’t believe anybody shows up at a ballpark and says, ‘I can’t wait to be sold to, marketed to or advertised to,’” Cole says.
A Business With A Peel: The Bananas are profitable, which is more than could be said for 11 MLB teams last season, according to Forbes estimates.
Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
If there is an opportunity to grow financially, Cole wants to seize it only if it improves the fan experience or the conditions of his staff and players, he says. It currently costs roughly $40,000 to cover the annual expenses for each member of a roughly 200-strong traveling party. They’re not staying in five-star hotels, but the accommodations are nice enough. “If you have made-to-order omelets, I’m all-in,” Cole, who still drives a 2018 Honda Accord, says with a laugh.
Cole boasts that most of his players earn two, and sometimes even three, times what minor leaguers typically make despite playing almost 100 fewer games, and he aims to give them “significant raises” each year. (For comparison, the minimum annual salary in Triple-A is around $40,000 for a 150-game season.)
“Obviously we’re not on big league contracts,” says Bananas shortstop Ryan Cox, who spent three years in the independent minors, “but they’re taking care of us better than any minor league guys.”
With ticket and merchandise sales accounting for more than 90% of the Bananas’ revenue, there is naturally the question of whether the organization can keep growing, and how. It’s no small issue given the history of the Globetrotters, who were a cultural touchstone in the 1970s but have drifted out of the mainstream.
For one thing, Cole plans to adopt a league format next season and add two more teams, boosting the inventory of dates. That’s good news for the 3.5 million fans on the Bananas’ waiting list, a figure Cole expects to double after the organization announces its 2026 schedule in a nationally televised show in October.
The Bananas also have no shortage of eager hosts, considering the venues keep all revenue from concessions and parking and the team never fails to draw a sellout crowd. In fact, as he predicts attendance to cross 3 million next year, Cole says the organization has received more than 200 bids from cities for the 2026 season. “We’re hearing from some of the most iconic, well-known, biggest stadiums in the world,” he says. “As a kid or when we started the Bananas, and I was sleeping on an air bed and we only sold two tickets, I’d never imagined that.”
What Cole did expect was criticism. To those who see Banana Ball as making a mockery of the sport, he simply says, “We’re not for them.” Cole is also under scrutiny after a recent Defector article questioned a lack of transparency in how the organization’s official charity, Bananas Foster, disburses its funds.
“Bananas Foster is a new nonprofit dedicated to celebrating those doing amazing things in the foster care community while educating and inspiring others to get involved,” Emily Cole said in a statement. “Beyond that, no donor dollar gifted to Bananas Foster is given to Savannah Bananas.”
Looking ahead, Jesse Cole has no plans to sell any of his teams or take on any outside capital—even though he says he has been approached by parties valuing the enterprise at $1 billion.
On first glance, that kind of valuation might seem far-fetched. For instance, Forbes pegged MLB teams this year at an average of 6.4 times revenue, with the Marlins all the way down at 3.3x. At that multiple, the Bananas would be far short.
But Edwin Draughan, the founder of sports consultancy Pivot Strategy Group and a former investment banker, says, “I wouldn’t think a 10x revenue multiple is too aggressive, given a lot of these sports teams that don’t have that same kind of trajectory are receiving those multiples right now, and they’re trying their hardest to generate revenue”—whereas the Bananas have more low-hanging fruit they could potentially collect. (According to Forbes estimates, average revenue multiples are 11.7x in the NBA, 10.7x in the NFL, 9.3x in MLS and 8.5x in the NHL.)
That possibility doesn’t faze Cole. A billion-dollar valuation, he says, wouldn’t change anything the Bananas do. Instead, he’s focused on attaining a different three-comma milestone.
“If we create one fan at a time and that reaches a billion fans, that’s something that I’m proud of,” Cole says. “And the money, again, takes care of itself, but it’s not something that I’m concerned with.”
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