I often begin with an apology for too long a time passing since writing last. But this time even an apology will not suffice. How long has it been since we spoke? – A year? – More? – Shame! – And by spoke I mean me speaking to you, of course– Anyhow, I am writing for good reason. It turns out there is a place with everything we ever wanted, a baseball field and decent weather in March, a place with no rules– more rules, actually, but different rules, better rules, rules to be followed, or not, or maybe to be changed sometime in the future, who knows, a baseball fantasy land where players are fans and fans are players, where walks turn into inside-the-park-home-runs, and inside-the-park-home-runs turn into cabbages. Gods of lightning and thunder rule the skies and flightless birds of paradise roam the infield without a care. No. No. No. Dear reader, it’s not the one night in that opium den in China Town you are thinking of or even a cornfield in Iowa. It’s not a film. It’s not fiction. It’s as real as Epcot Center on a Sunday. There is a place where we are not bound by the natural laws of the baseball universe, where time and space collide and create a new dimension, an alternate reality. That place is Savannah, Georgia… Banana Land.
It all starts with a man in a yellow tuxedo. But then again, doesn’t everything? The story is well know. Man purchases baseball team. Man names the team the Bananas, man begins cross dressing as a flamboyant children’s birthday party clown balloon animal expert Charlie Chaplin, team discovers and renovates to scale replica of the Coliseum at abandoned local archeological site, team goes on to sell out every home game for the next five years. It’s a story as old as love itself. You’ve heard it a million times, so enough with the cliches.
With that kind of success, there was only one thing to do, change all the basic rules of the game of baseball, call this new game Banana Ball (naturally), find a few coaches and players crazy enough to try it out, and take the show on the road. Go deeper down the wormhole, basically. So that’s what we did.
If you’re going to try something as stupid and dangerous as this, I am, we agree, by now, probably the right person to do it with, so I flew down to Savannah for tryouts. As anticipated, a group of vagrants with mullets had gathered. These were them. Is that right? This was them, perhaps, maybe… These was them– Anyhow, they were the right men for the job, so we put them in a decades long medically induced coma with no return flight home like the first sacrificial cosmonauts to land on Mars. Meet the teams…
But instead of traveling through time on a spacecraft to the Red Planet, they traveled to Mobile, Alabama on a ship called a bus. It was time for the One City World Tour, like a real world tour, but two nights in one city. Get it? Check it out.
There is a place where we can make our own rules, where players are free to be themselves, where base coaches and umpires are actually just break dancers and a man on stilts pinch hits in the bottom of the fourth inning every night. There is a place where anything is possible.
And that place is Savannah, Georgia. Banana Land.
Thank you to Jesse Cole and the Savannah Bananas for trying something as crazy as this, and for having me along for the ride. And thank you to all the players and coaches. Let’s get weird.