Savannah Bananas
Sam Parr had one note about Jesse Cole in all caps: “THIS GUY DESERVES A BILLION DOLLARS.” He said he had never thought that about anyone before. Shaan Puri said after doing a deep dive: “I want to be like him.”
This is how two experienced entrepreneurs who have seen a lot of businesses react to a baseball team with $268 in its checking account when it started.
Where They Are Now
The numbers are hard to believe in context. The Savannah Bananas have a 3-million-person waitlist to buy tickets. You cannot purchase a ticket if you want one — you have to win a lottery for the chance to attend. Revenue is estimated between $70 and $100 million annually. They have more TikTok and social media followers than every MLB team combined — including the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers. The company, FanFirst Entertainment, is valued approaching a billion dollars.
They sell $20 to $30 million per year in merchandise alone.
The Origin
Jesse Cole was a college baseball player who made it to the Cape Cod Summer League — the premier amateur summer league. He was good enough to get there. He wasn’t good enough to play regularly. Sitting on the bench watching games he wasn’t in, he had a realization: baseball is really boring to watch.
His first job was general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies, a college summer league team with 200 fans per game and $268 in the checking account. He wasn’t even paid at first. He spent evenings reading about Disney, PT Barnum, the WWE, the UFC, the Grateful Dead, and Apple — anyone who had figured out how to build a fan base — while working days trying to sell tickets. He spent nearly a decade experimenting, generating one media story in his first 10 years.
Finding the Stadium
Cole met his future wife Emily at a seminar he hosted for minor league baseball people. He was showing what he’d learned: grandma beauty pageants, dollar hot dogs, a “dig to China” night (one-way ticket, no accommodation — no one actually went). They married. On a trip to Savannah, Georgia, they visited a minor league stadium and fell in love with it. A year later, when the tenant team demanded a $35 million new stadium and the city said no, the team left. Cole cut a deal: $20,000 per year to lease the stadium and create a team in the Coastal Plain League.
It didn’t start well. He sold two tickets in the first months. He hosted a fan event and so few people showed up that the venue didn’t charge him for the food out of pity. He and his wife ran out of money. She sold their house. They moved into a garage apartment and slept on a twin air mattress in socks.
Cole’s source of motivation: Walt Disney went bankrupt. PT Barnum struggled. “This is just our struggle era.”
The Name and the Philosophy
A naming contest produced “Savannah Bananas” — submitted by a 62-year-old nurse. Everyone told him no. He said yes: the Nanas (a grandma dance team), the Man-Nanas (male cheerleaders), the whole ecosystem of ideas around the name. He spent money he didn’t have on a logo — $12,000 from a design agency when he and his wife were living on $40 a week.
The business philosophy: flat $25 tickets, and they pay your sales tax. They now cover millions of dollars in tax annually just to deliver on that promise. The company name — FanFirst Entertainment — was the North Star. Every decision ran through one filter: is this fan-first?
Banana Ball
Cole invented a set of modified baseball rules he called “Banana Ball”: foul balls caught by fans count as outs; walks require all defenders to touch the ball; bunts get you ejected; games are capped at exactly two hours. As Sam noted: “Children need to be home at bed by a certain time — it’s going to be a family event, therefore it’s a strict two hours.”
Cole’s idea generation system: starting in 2016, he wrote down 10 new ideas every single day. His own description: “A lot are bad ideas — 70, 80% terrible. But you’ve got to work your idea muscle.” He also watched security camera footage after every game to track when fans stood up, when they got bored, when they left their seats — then reverse-engineered what was happening in the game at those moments.
The Lesson
Sam Parr’s summary: “You say to yourself, ‘When I get big, I’ll worry about that stuff.’ It’s the other way around. You worry about that stuff, and then you get big.”
Shaan’s: “It’s the insane part of ‘insanely great’ that actually matters.” Cole wasn’t trying to make a slightly better baseball team. He was trying to make baseball unrecognizable.
After spending the entire episode on the story, Shaan said: “I think we should just call it that.” Sam ended with a personal message to Jesse Cole recorded at the end of the episode, asking him to come on the show.
See also: jesse-cole, jesse-itzler, personal-branding, mrbeast