Savannah Bananas get national attention with HBO feature, ESPN+ documentary series

Lights! Cameras! Bananas!

The national media spotlight is getting brighter for the Savannah Bananas with announcements that the baseball team will be featured on television and on subscription streaming services.

ESPN has teased on social media platforms Twitter and Facebook that "Bananaland" is coming to ESPN+ this summer. Though details were sparse, the documentary-style series is expected to be six 30-minute episodes chronicling "Banana Ball," an unorthodox brand of the sport played this spring in Savannah and on a tour of six other Southeastern cities to sellout crowds.

Starting this week, HBO's "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel" features "Banana Ball" as a segment on its new episode debuting Tuesday at 10 p.m. on the premium cable network and streamed on HBO Max.

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"It's a rollicking story. It's a fun story to tell," correspondent Mary Carillo said Monday morning from Paris, where she is covering the French Open tennis tournament.

"I don't think Parisians have really heard of the Savannah Bananas, but I intend to tell them all about it," she quipped.

More and more people are hearing about Banana Ball, a spinoff from the ballclub's more traditional squad of college players in the Coastal Plain League, a strictly summer league that starts at the end of the month at Grayson Stadium.

In both cases, the circus-like atmosphere of music, dancing and comedy bits doesn't stop from before, during and even after games. The Savannah Bananas Premier Team is a professional travel squad that plays the Party Animals in a version of baseball with very different rules to speed up play and generate more action and dramatic situations.

The Bananas — featured nationally in print, television and online media outlets — have 2.5 million followers on TikTok, which got Carillo's attention.

Carillo also was impressed by the multiple generations of fans enjoying the game and show each night when she and the HBO film crew visited Grayson Stadium.

"It's not your grandfather's baseball. It's not your father's baseball," Carillo said. "In this day and age, I don't think there are that many things that little kids and grandparents can go to, that's just open to anybody, that there's something for everybody.

"The baseball actually is pretty good. We saw a couple of games. There was good pitching and good hitting. Baseball is being played."

David Beilinson is the producer and director of "Bananaland." He makes films with partners Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley at RUMUR Inc., an independent production studio.

He was assigned last July to check out the "crazy baseball games" in Savannah when the Bananas were on their way to winning the 2021 Coastal Plain League title, but it was no ordinary success story.

"No clue what the team was," Beilinson said in a recent interview in Savannah. "Just saw pictures of this guy wearing a yellow suit and a bunch of players dancing and said 'OK, this is interesting.' And I got to Grayson Stadium and saw what happened. My mind was blown."

Beilinson created a 7-minute documentary film on the Bananas which was shown on ESPN's "SportsCenter." The guy in the yellow suit was team co-owner Jesse Cole, who started the Bananas with his wife Emily in Savannah in 2016.

"It got a lot of attention online," Beilinson said. "I think it did a lot for the Bananas to expose them to a bigger audience. And I loved working with Jesse (Cole). I said to him, you know there's something bigger here and it's the way you guys run your operation, the process by which you go through and put these shows on. I felt there was a larger story than a five-minute piece for television. And so we put this pitch together to do a longer-form series."

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Beilinson and his crew of 15 to 17 people followed the team almost daily from tryouts in late February through the last tour stop in Kansas City in early May. They captured the action in front of the crowds and behind the scenes as well as conducted interviews for more than 100 hours of footage.

"I think it's very rare in this day and age with social media and the proliferation of content and the ability to see everything, that you could still discover something wholly unique in the United States that other people hadn't seen," Beilinson said. "And I think that's what they've got going down here."

Nathan Dominitz is the Sports Content Editor of the Savannah Morning News and savannahnow.com. Email him at ndominitz@savannahnow.com. Twitter: @NathanDominitz

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah Bananas on ESPN HBO Real Sports TV streaming services