Why This Baseball Team Has a 4.2 Million Person Waitlist With Savannah Bananas Founder Jesse Cole
April 14, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe Savannah Bananas have a 4.2 million person waitlist for tickets. Founder Jesse Cole built a baseball entertainment company that sells out stadiums nationwide, but the origin story is less about fixing baseball and more about survival. As a 23-year-old general manager of a college summer league team in Gastonia, North Carolina, Cole had $268 in the bank account and a couple hundred fans per game. Nobody wanted to come watch baseball. So he stopped trying to sell baseball and started selling a show.
The Real Origin: Solving for Nobody Wanting Your Product
Cole’s insight was not that baseball needed to be faster or more exciting for existing fans. It was that he had no fans at all. When he invited people to "come see our show," they told him they didn't like baseball. His response was to make it not baseball. "Baseball is just the canvas," he says, "but it's not really baseball." For the first 15 years, the Bananas didn't change the actual game. They focused entirely on the experience around it: music, dancing, celebrations, and player interactions. Cole learned from P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney. Barnum taught him to create something so unique that people would leave and tell everyone. Disney taught him to control the entire experience and always "plus the show." The Bananas didn't compete against other baseball teams. They competed against Netflix, video games, and Disne
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Opening: The Upper Deck Philosophy** - Simon introduces the Savannah Bananas' unprecedented 4.2 million person waitlist and Jesse Cole's "fans first" philosophy.
- 2 (02:20) **The Birth of the Idea** - Jesse traces the origin of the Bananas to his own boredom watching baseball and a desire to create nonstop entertainment.
- 3 (05:10) **Learning from Walt Disney and P.T. Barnum** - Jesse shares how he studied the greatest showmen to create a new kind of experience, not just a faster baseball game.
- 4 (07:37) **The Real Origin: A Show, Not a Sport** - Simon reframes the origin: Jesse wasn't trying to fix baseball; he was trying to get people to come to a dying team by making it not about baseball.
- 5 (09:09) **The Infinite Game of Constant Reinvention** - Jesse reveals the relentless daily improvement system that keeps the experience fresh and drives the business.
- 6 (10:37) **Scale and the 14,000 Person Job Waitlist** - Jesse shares the current size of the operation and what metric he is most proud of.
- 7 (11:10) **A Dying Breed: Passion Over Growth** - Simon contrasts Jesse's approach with the modern startup world obsessed with liquidity and venture capital.
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Show Notes
We talk a lot about building successful things. But what does it actually take to build something people love?
Jesse Cole has built an entirely new genre of entertainment: The Savannah Bananas and the Banana Ball League. They’re a viral sensation, selling out stadiums across the country, and have over 4.2 million fans on their ticket waitlist. On the surface, Banana Ball looks like a wild and entertaining version of baseball. But underneath it all is something much more disciplined: an obsession with the fan experience.
Jesse calls his approach Fans First and it’s more than a slogan and the title of his book… It’s a standard. Every minute of the two-hour games are crammed with attention grabbing spectacle. It’s a full-blown live experience designed for every seat in the stadium: players dance, fans are part of the show, trick plays defy the laws of physics, there are multiple sing-alongs… all during an actual baseball game.
In this conversation, we talk about building something new for others, from embracing years of failure (including selling just two tickets in the first three months), to creating experiences that make people feel included, joyful, and valued. We also discuss how he took inspiration from Disney and PT Barnum, the importance of affordable in-person experiences, and how his team reviews every single detail after every show to get better the next day.
Because what Jesse’s building goes beyond just entertainment. It’s a place where people can feel seen for generations to come. And in a world that often moves too fast to build things with care… Those human details might be what matter most.
This… is A Bit of Optimism.
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To learn more about the Banana Ball League or sign up for the ticket waitlist, check out: https://bananaball.com/
Or if you want all things Savannah Bananas, head to: https://thesavannahbananas.com/
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