Banana Ball: The Unbelievably True Story of the Savannah Bananas by Jesse Cole, with Don Yaeger. Dutton. 269 pages. 2023
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This book is about the Savanah Bananas and what they call “Banana Ball”. The slogan for the Bananas is “Fans First. Entertain Always”. In the beginning, Jesse Cole had the persistent belief that if he could somehow get people to their ballpark in Savannah, they would have more fun than they had ever dreamed possible.
wWell, it’s working. The Bananas are selling out major league baseball and college football stadiums. A few weeks ago, they drew 102,000 fans at Kyle Field (the Texas A&M football stadium in College Station, Texas). The tickets are by lottery, and hard to get. I know this as we tried in vain to get tickets to the two August games at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.
Cole is the front man for the Bananas. His belief is that major league baseball had become too slow and boring (Note: this was before the pitch clock and other major league baseball rule changes). Baseball was no longer the game he grew up loving and playing.
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BOOK REVIEWS ~ More of this review and a review of Everyday Hallelujah: Unlocking Deep Joy Through Everyday Acts of Worship by Phil Wickham with Matt Litton
BOOK NEWS ~ Links to Interesting Articles
BOOK CLUB ~What Is Wrong with the World? The Surprising, Hopeful Answer to the Question We Cannot Avoid by Tim Keller
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Cole eventually implemented “Banana Ball rules”, where they got rid of the game’s laborious moments and gave fans more of what they really wanted – fast-paced excitement and things they never imagined seeing on a baseball field. His intention was to make baseball fun. For example, the Bananas games have a clock, and the games top out at two hours. They don’t allow bunts. Batters can steal first base. And if a fan catches a foul ball in the stands, it’s an out. Also, to help avoid “blow out” situations where fans would lose interest, the winner of each inning gets a point. Very unlike a major league baseball game.
Cole tells his story, which includes meeting and partnering with future wife Emily, operating and managing the Martinsville Mustangs, a Virginia team in the Coastal Plain League, moving from an intern to the twenty-three-year-old general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies, and buying the Savannah franchise.
Some of his influences are Walt Disney, P. T. Barnum, and Bill Veeck. They were legendary marketers and promoters. They taught him about showmanship, attracting attention, and having fun.
Hi writes about coming up with the Savannah Bananas team name and logo. He got significant pushback on the team name, but now the team’s merchandise is a hot seller.
One of the keys to the organization is listening to and watching their fans. For example, he noted that no matter how good of a time fans were having, they would leave at about the two-hour point, usually in the sixth inning.
He writes about the Bananas tryouts (some of the players would end up on the rival Party Animals), the Bananas significant social media presence, and constantly thinking of new ideas for the Bananas. For example, every Monday, their staff gets together and they kick around ideas in their OTT (Over-The-Top) sessions.
The Bananas would branch out from Savannah to play in other cities, including in Kansas City against the Kansas City Monarchs, an excellent independent league team filled with former major leaguers. After their summer college team won the 2022 Coastal Plain League (CPL) championship, they decided to leave the CPL to become a full-time Banana Ball team. They wanted to tour the United States and later the whole world on their own schedule.
Belief is a powerful force for Cole. He writes that when you believe in your vision and your dreams, anything is possible.
Cole’s organization started with a blank slate in 2016 when they knew the game of baseball had to change. Their principle was simple: What parts of a baseball game are long, slow, and boring? How do they do the opposite? And the rest is history.
This is a fast moving, and entertaining history of the Savannah Bananas and Banana Ball.
Everyday Hallelujah: Unlocking Deep Joy Through Everyday Acts of Worship by Phil Wickham with Matt Litton. Thomas Nelson. 208 pages. 2026
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I enjoy the worship music of Phil Wickham. We sing some of his songs – “Living Hope” and “Hymn for Heaven” for example – in our church worship services, and my wife Tammy and I will be seeing him in concert soon.
This book of 36 relatively short chapters (7-8 minutes to read each one), looks at different aspects of worshipping God. Worship doesn’t have to take place in a church worship service or a worship concert. We can worship God as we gaze on His creation. We can worship God in our work, doing all of our work for the Lord (Colossians 3: 23-24).
Wickham invites us to see worship not as a Sunday-morning ritual but as a way of life, a way to receive and give God’s grace and to celebrate his faithfulness. Some of the aspects of worship that Wickham looks at in this book are from the mountain tops to the valley of the shadows, like the angels and the shepherds, as an act of resistance, with great expectations, because the debt is paid and the tomb is empty, with the church as the center of worship, worshipping with God’s words, gratitude, and much more.
Wickham fills the book with scripture, beginning each chapter with a Bible passage that sets the stage for that chapter. He includes personal stories, references a few of his songs, and ends each chapter with a short practical “Everyday Hallelujah Challenge”.
I listened to the audiobook version of the book, which was well read by Wickham. The book could also be read as a daily devotional, using each of the 36 short readings and the “Everyday Hallelujah Challenge each day.
- My Book Reviews. Enjoy nearly 600 of my book reviews on Goodreads. Read my recent reviews of The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh, Everyday Hallelujah: Unlocking Deep Joy Through Everyday Acts of Worship by Phil Wickham with Matt Litton, and Banana Ball: The Unbelievably True Story of the Savannah Bananas by Jesse Cole.
- Study, Savor and Share Scripture: Becoming What We Behold. My wife Tammy has published a book about HOW to study the Bible. The book is available on Amazon in both a Kindle and paperback edition. She writes “Maybe you have read the Bible but want to dig deeper and know God and know yourself better. Throughout the book I use the analogy of making a quilt to show how the Bible is telling one big story about what God is doing in the world through Christ. Quilting takes much patience and precision, just like studying the Bible, but the end result is well worth it.”
- What to Make of a Life. I really enjoyed these two – one and two – episodes of the Andy Stanley Leadership podcast with Jim Collins as Stanley and Collins discussed Collins’ new book What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative, which I am now reading.
Won’t you read along with us?
What Is Wrong with the World?: The Surprising, Hopeful Answer to the Question We Cannot Avoid by Tim Keller
Please join us in reading the first book of Tim Keller’s that has been released since his death in 2023.
From the Amazon description:
“During his tenure as founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, Timothy Keller explained on a weekly basis how the Bible provides the most comprehensive and sophisticated response to the fundamental questions of life. In What Is Wrong with the World?, based on a series of teachings given at Redeemer, Keller answers the title’s pressing question by revealing that the only thing that can account for the world’s pain and chaos is what the Bible calls sin. This clear-eyed and ultimately hopeful book reveals how sin is not simply a “bad” thing we do but something much more subtle and complex, affecting our relationships, our thinking, and every aspect of our existence. And only when we recognize sin for what it is can we find the profound, life-transforming answer our souls long for.”
This week, we look at Chapter 7: Sin as Leprosy (Part 2). Here are a few helpful quotes from the chapter:
- Naaman continually goes to kings to better his life, yet God insists on speaking to him through servants. Naaman repeatedly seeks the company of somebodies, but God introduces him to salvation through nobodies. And that is a crucial lesson for us today.
- One of the great conceits of the modern world is that we think we’re searching for God, but the reality is that we aren’t. We are not searching for God. What we’re searching for is satisfaction.
- In general, it is the humble, the uncool, the uneducated, the poor, and the unsuccessful—the people on the margins—who grasp the gospel most quickly.
- Jesus had to be a nobody so that he could die on the cross and God could both pay for our sins and save us at the same time—so he could be both just and justifier.
- The somebody became nobody so that we nobodies could become somebodies. That’s the gospel.
- When we suffer, either we can turn to God or we can let our hardship grow our desire for consolation in this world.
- Pay the price of usefulness and you can become a light in a dark place and possibly shake the counsels of the great. God can use you in incredible ways because God uses nobodies.
