Major League Baseball is dying of boredom, yet a team named after a fruit—led by a man in a bright yellow tuxedo—is currently outselling the Yankees and boasts a waitlist of 3.2 million people. In this episode, we dissect the chaotic genius of the Savannah Bananas and their founder, Jesse Cole. We explore how he took a "dumb" product (a minor league team that gets booed at parades) and turned it into a global entertainment empire by instituting rules that would give a purist a heart attack: players on stilts, grandma dance squads, and counting foul balls caught by fans as outs. It’s a case study on what happens when you stop trying to be respectable and start trying to be remarkable.

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Dumbify celebrates ideas so weird, wrong, or wildly impractical… they just might be brilliant. Hosted by David Carson, a serial entrepreneur behind multiple hundred-million-dollar companies and the go-to secret weapon for companies looking to unlock new markets through unconventional thinking. Dumbify dives into the messy, counter-intuitive side of creativity — the “dumb” ideas that built empires, broke rules, and ended up changing everything.

I need to confess something that feels illegal to say out loud in America. I don't actually like baseball. I wanna like baseball. I like the idea of baseball. I like the uniforms. I like the vibe. I like that it's the only sport where your dad can fully fall asleep and still claim that he watched the whole thing. But every time I go to a game, I have this moment around the fourth inning where I realize I'm basically just watching a meeting, a three-hour meeting where everyone is dressed like Dennis from nineteen twelve, and I don't even blame baseball. It's doing what it was designed to do: be baseball.

It's me who keeps showing up, expecting it to feel like a concert or a party, or at least a human being trying something. Because here's what happens to me. I sit there, I stare at the field, I stare at the scoreboard, I stare at a kid in row seven who has fully committed to licking the seat in front of him like it's his job, and I think, "Is this entertainment, or am I just paying two hundred and nineteen dollars for nachos and watching time pass?" And then, like clockwork, I look around and I see the diehards, the purists, the people who treat baseball like it's a sacred text, and I'm jealous of them. I wish I could feel that. I wish I could just watch a one to zero game in the rain and whisper to myself, "This is peak civilization." But my brain just doesn't do that. My brain does this other thing where it starts trying to fix it. Like, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, "What if between innings, the players did a little group therapy check-in? What if the bat was on fire? What if the umpire had to do stand-up comedy after every bad call? And what if the losing team had to switch uniforms with the fans?" And yes, I understand this is why I'm not allowed near anything considered traditional. I'm basically that guy who shows up to a funeral and goes, "Have we tried confetti?" But that exact impulse, this itch to make the normal thing feel alive again,

I guess, is why I'm so obsessed with today's story. Because somewhere out there in Savannah, Georgia, a man looked at baseball and said, "This is boring, and if we don't admit that, we're going to die of politeness." And then he did something that shouldn't have worked. He put on a bright yellow tuxedo. He named a baseball team the Savannah Bananas, and he accidentally created a live entertainment empire. And before you roll your eyes, because I know I can feel you rolling your eyes, just hear me out, because this story isn't really about baseball. It's about what happens when you stop trying to be taken so seriously and start trying to be remembered. So let's do this. Let's get dumb.

Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genius hides in daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes. So honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify. Yelling like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with juice.

[upbeat music] Okay, so Jesse Cole, if you don't know him, here's the quickest way to picture him: Imagine if Willy Wonka became a motivational speaker and then got hired as a baseball promoter by a banana. He wears a yellow tux all the time. Not just sometimes, not for special occasions. I mean, his whole brand is basically, "I'm dressed like a human highlighter, and you're just gonna have to deal with it." And that's not even the wild part. The wild part is that he built this whole thing not by being subtle, but by being aggressively, obnoxiously obvious about one idea: fans first, always. Not fans matter, not we value the fan experience, or

we're committed to community engagement. No, he means it literally. He means if something is good for the fan and bad for tradition, well, then tradition is just gonna have to take the L, which, if you're a baseball purist, kind of sounds like a hate crime. But here's the thing about baseball: It's dying. The median age of a baseball fan is fifty-seven years old and climbing. Major League attendance peaked out at around eighty million in two thousand and seven, and it's been sliding ever since. The average MLB game now takes three hours and twelve minutes, which is longer than The Godfather, and unlike The Godfather, there's a reasonable chance nothing interesting happens.

Kids don't even want to play baseball anymore. They don't want to watch it. They don't even want to pretend to care about it. Baseball has become the thing your dad or even your granddad puts on the TV while he falls asleep in his recliner, and the official response from Major League Baseball has been kind of lacking. Well, they did add a pitch clock. They limited mound visits from the catcher. They basically shifted some rules around the margins, and some serious people in serious suits made what they thought were very serious adjustments to try and shave eight minutes off the runtime. Eight minutes. Jesse Cole looked at all of this, and he said

something that would have gotten him laughed out of any sports business conference in America.... He said, "What if we make baseball a circus?"

But before I tell you about Banana Ball, you need to understand where Jesse Cole's brain was at. In his twenties, before any of this, Jesse was coaching baseball in the Cape Cod League, which is basically the Harvard of college summer baseball. The best players in the country, the best seat in the house, literally. He, he's in the dugout with future major leaguers, but Jesse was bored out of his mind. "There's a difference when you're playing the game versus when you're watching the game," he later said. "And I was like, 'All right, I know we're going to hit and run here. The hitter's coming up, we're going to bring in this guy.' And I'm like, still bored, and I'm like, 'I can't imagine the fans that don't love baseball, how they're feeling.'" That's what he said. He was sitting in a dugout at elite-level baseball, and he couldn't wait for the game to be over.

That's not a casual observation; that's kind of a crisis of faith. That's the moment you realize the thing you've devoted your life to might have fundamental problems that nobody wants to talk about. So Jesse started reading. He didn't read, like, sports management books. He didn't read about baseball history.

He read about P.T. Barnum and the circus, about Walt Disney and the theme park. He even read about Saturday Night Live and World Wrestling. He was studying showmanship, spectacle, the architecture of joy. And for ten years, he ran a tiny college summer team in Gastonia, North Carolina, and he experimented. Grandma beauty pageants, flatulence fun night, which is exactly what it sounds like. There was even a promotion called Dig to China Night, where they buried a certificate to China in the infield dirt, and after the game, everyone dug for it. The prize, by the way, was a one-way ticket to China. No return flight, no accommodations, just, "Here's a plane ticket. Good luck." They fired their mascot publicly for beard growth hormone during the steroid scandal. They offered George W. Bush an internship after his presidency ended. They did anything, literally anything, to make people feel something other than the quiet despair of watching a four-hour baseball game on a Tuesday night. The baseball establishment thought Jesse Cole was an embarrassment. I talked to a former minor league executive who worked during this era, and when I described Jesse's promotions, he just sighed and said: "Look, minor league baseball has always had goofy promotion nights. There's been bobblehead giveaways, fireworks, whatever, but what Jesse was doing felt disrespectful. He was treating the game like it was secondary to the entertainment, like the baseball was just an excuse to do weird stuff, and a lot of us felt like that crossed the line." The Coastal Plain League, which Jesse's team was part of, sort of tolerated him because he was pretty successful. He took a team that was getting two hundred fans a game, and he turned it into one of the most attended teams in the league. But there was always this sense, according to people I talked to, that he was doing baseball wrong, that he was somehow cheapening it. And Jesse's response was essentially, "Maybe cheapening it is what it needs. Marketing is not what you say," he said, "Marketing is what you do. You have to create an experience that is remarkable." The word remarkable is doing a lot of work there. Remarkable doesn't mean good. Remarkable means worth remarking on. It means people cannot shut up about it. You know, it means someone goes home and tells their spouse about this thing that they just saw, not because it was excellent, but because it was memorable. A beautiful double play is excellent. A grandma dance team doing choreographed routines in a rainstorm while wearing white jerseys is remarkable. Now, this is the part where Savannah Bananas are truly born, and it all starts, oddly enough, with the name. Because when you're launching a team, you need a great name, and there are two basic options to go with here. Option A: do something intimidating, something that sounds like you could invade a small country, or there's the less traveled road of option B: go with something that sounds like it could be on a children's menu at a Denny's. Baseball is mostly option A. Tigers, Bulls, Hawks, Warriors, Predators... It's all very, "We are fearsome," and Jesse, well, instead of picking fearsome, he picks [chuckles] pretty stupid. He picks Bananas, and I absolutely love all of this because you can feel how wrong it is. Even saying it out loud feels wrong. The Savannah Bananas. Sounds like a minor league team designed by a lame dad trying to make his kids laugh in the car, and I think that's why it's so brilliant, because the name itself is kind of a filter. It instantly tells you, "We are not playing the take us seriously game." And the little detail that always makes me laugh and feel kind of proud for Jesse Cole is that when the team name gets announced to the town at a parade-... They get booed, which is such a specific kind of failure, because getting booed at a parade isn't like getting booed at a game. A game is adversarial. A game has winners and losers. It's only natural someone is going to get booed. But at a parade? Well, that's supposed to be the one place where everyone agrees to just get along. We like things moving down the street, just nice and peppy, not booed. Imagine being so unlikable that even the parade crowd, people who clap for a horrible-sounding marching band that sounds like a grinding machine that helps cats copulate on a tin roof, they decide, "No, not this!" That's exactly what Jesse Cole and his Savannah Banana crew walks into. Instead of panicking, instead of going, "Okay, we made a branding mistake," Jesse Cole leans in. He buys billboards with a giant banana on them. He starts showing up everywhere, like a big, yellow cartoon character, and he takes the booing as feedback, but not the way most people take feedback. Most people treat feedback like a courtroom. They hear, "Boo," and they go, "Okay, I'm guilty. I must change." But Jesse hears a boo, and he goes, "Oh, good, you're awake." Because Jesse figures that the attention is the hardest part, and once you have attention, well, you can shape it. You can do something with it. And this, to me, is the first dumbify lesson of the Savannah Bananas. If people are reacting, you're alive. If people are indifferent, you're toast, and not the good kind, 'cause I love toast, but I digress. We have been trained to fear cringe, to fear looking dumb, to fear being the person who tries too hard. But you know what's worse than trying too hard? Being so safe that no one even has an opinion about you. Safe is the equivalent of being invisible, and invisible is the quiet death of every creative business, every artist, every brand, every idea you've ever had that you kept realistic.

So Jesse shows up in Savannah with his Bananas, gets booed in the streets, and yet somehow convinces four thousand people to show up for opening night just to watch the disaster unfold. The baseball that night was, by Jesse's own admission, pretty terrible. The team made six errors. The players wore green uniforms because, as Jesse explained, "We weren't quite ripe yet." But here's what happened. When it started raining during a delay, Jesse looked at his senior citizen dance team, the Banana Nanas, I'm not making that up, and he said, "Just go out and dance." So these little grandmas went out onto the field in white jerseys, no less, and danced in the pouring rain, and the players delivered roses to little girls in the crowd. And there was even a breakdancing coach that led choreographed routines. The whole thing was just chaos and joy and nothing like what baseball was supposed to be. And at the end of the game, all four thousand people were still there. Nobody had left early, which is unheard of in baseball, and the very next day, they started selling out. But Jesse wasn't satisfied because he kept going undercover to his own games, sort of his hat pulled low, just watching the fans and, and he noticed something. Around nine o'clock, people would just start leaving. Every night, nine o'clock, people got up and headed for the exits. He had someone on his team photograph the grandstands every thirty minutes for an entire season. He tracked exactly when people left, and he realized even with all that entertainment, even with the dancing and the costumes and the promotions, the actual game of baseball was still losing them. He realized it's a fundamental problem with the game. He said, "You know, I think about it like a New York City hotdog stand. You've got the great condiments, you've got sauerkraut, you got the mustard, you got ketchup. That's all of our entertainment. But the hot dog still needs work, and the hot dog is baseball." So Jesse started keeping an idea book, and his goal was to have ten ideas every day. He'd been doing this since two thousand and sixteen, and most of the ideas were pretty bad, like seventy percent bad, but that was the point. You work your idea muscle, you generate volume, and eventually, you have a good idea. He started by asking a question that would make any baseball traditionalist break out in hives: What are all the boring parts of a baseball game?

Well, for one, how about the mound visits? That's the part of the game where the catcher walks out to the pitcher, and they just stand around there talking for ninety seconds about God knows what, while everyone in the stadium just contemplates the meaningless of existence. Nobody in the history of watching baseball has ever said, "Oh, awesome, another mound visit! I was really hoping we'd slow everything down again." So Jesse eliminated mound visits entirely. Gone. Or how about stepping out of the batter's box? Jesse once watched a Major League game where Yasiel Puig, the Cuban sensation, he stepped out of the batter's box for twenty-five to thirty-five seconds between every pitch. So basically, six pitches at bat took three minutes of not baseball, three minutes of this guy adjusting his batting gloves like he's performing surgery on himself. So-... New rule: You step out of that batter's box, and it's a strike. Or how about walks? There's an actual play in baseball that's called a walk, and Jesse sat with that for a minute, and he said, "It's just so unathletic. It's called the walk. What's wrong with us?" So he set a new rule. There are no more traditional walks. When the pitcher throws a ball for the fourth time, it becomes a sprint, and the catcher has to throw the ball to every fielder, while the batter gets to try and run as many bases as he can. So suddenly, a walk becomes the absolute most exciting play in the game. Chaos just erupts. The defense is scrambling. The runner might even end up on third base. Just who knows? And I like this other new rule a lot. It's actually my favorite. He sets a two-hour time limit. If you're not done in two hours, whoever is ahead at that time, they win. And the cherry on top is this other rule that says, if a fan catches a foul ball, that's considered an out, so the fans are now essentially playing defense. That's amazing. So Jesse ends up adding eleven rules in total, and it's precisely eleven because K is the eleventh letter in the alphabet, and K is the symbol, of course, for potassium, which is in bananas, and he called the whole thing Banana Ball.

The first time they tested Banana Ball, it was behind closed doors at a Division II college. No crowd, no cameras, just players and a few girlfriends sitting in the stands doing their homework. Just nine innings, ninety-nine minutes, and the girlfriends, they started looking up from their homework. They started watching. They'd never watched a practice before. This time, they just couldn't look away because it was fun. The players said it was the most fun they'd ever had playing baseball, ever. And, you know, here's the thing. When you start changing the rules of a sport, you're kind of committing a form of heresy. Sports have rules precisely because they're supposed to be unchangeable. The whole point is that baseball, in twenty twenty-four at least, is recognizable the same way that baseball was recognizable in nineteen twenty-four. That's the tradition. That's the sacredness. So when Jesse Cole announced Banana Ball, the traditional baseball world reacted like he'd set fire to Cooperstown. Sports business people said he was building the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, which sounds like a compliment, but it was meant as an insult. The Globetrotters, as Jesse well knew, had peaked in the nineteen forties when they were a legitimate competitive team. Then they slowly became sort of a novelty act with scripted outcomes. Nobody wears Globetrotters jerseys anymore because nobody cares. But here's what Jesse said back: "The Party Animals almost beat the Bananas this year. Last year, they won the tour. We don't script the outcomes. The games are real. That's the key distinction. The Harlem Globetrotters chose entertainment over competition." And Jesse Cole said, "Why not both?" [upbeat music] I want to tell you about the stilts guy, because the stilts guy is maybe my favorite detail in this entire story. On the first tryout for Banana Ball

in twenty twenty, about fifty players show up. Most of them are former college players. Some even played minor league ball. A few played high school. They're there to make one of two teams, the Bananas and their rivals, the Party Animals. And one kid shows up who's not great, hasn't played since high school, average at everything, and the coaches are watching him, and he's just not gonna make the cut. End of the tryout, this kid walks up to Jesse Cole, and he says, "Hey, I got stilts. You want me to wear them?" And Jesse says, "No, not really, unless you can hit with them." Now, what Jesse didn't know was that this kid had never hit a ball in stilts in his entire life. He hadn't even worn stilts since he was twelve years old. His mother had seen the tryout announcement, signed him up, and said, "You gotta do this. They want people who are different. They want things people have never seen before on a baseball field." So the kid gets into the batter's box on stilts, and everyone obviously stops what they're doing, and he starts hitting line drives, real contact on stilts. After the tryout, the coaches pull Jesse aside. "Look, we can't take him. He can't play at this level. We don't have a roster spot." And Jesse looks at them, and he says, "Guys, he hits on stilts. What do you mean you can't take him? He can't really play baseball, but make a roster spot for him. I don't care what you call it. Call it the entertainment player." And Jesse walks out. Twenty minutes later, the coaches created an entertainment roster spot, and Stilts, that's literally what they call him now, became one of the first viral sensations of Banana Ball. [gentle music] Every week before a game, the Bananas staff run what they call pitch sessions.

It's where they sit around a table, and they throw out ideas. They call it the SNL model, and they'll say things like, "What are we gonna do between innings? What are the players gonna do? What haven't people seen on a baseball field before?" They show up to each game with around ten to fifteen planned bits, plus whatever the players can improvise. There's a choreographed dance every single night. There are skits. There are promotions that make the Dig to China thing look pretty restrained, and the players, they're not just baseball players anymore. They train with a dance instructor named Masao.... And Jesse has watched guys show up unable to dance, and after a season, go to country bars and take over the entire dance floor. He said, "These guys have millions of followers on social media. They have more followers than Major League players." And they're learning all of this, trick plays, dancing, social content, how to go into the crowd and deliver roses, how to be fans first. It's sort of a different track. They're not just trying to be the best baseball player. They're trying to be the greatest entertainer.

Time for science. Time to get unnecessarily nerdy with it, 'cause nerding out is what we do, and we're not going to apologize for it. Get ready for science.

Dr. Peter McGraw at the University of Colorado runs something called the Human Research Lab. And yes, that's a real thing. And also, yes, I really wanna work there. He has spent years studying what makes things funny, engaging, and memorable. His theory is called benign violation, and it's the idea that humor and engagement comes from the intersection of just two things: something that violates our expectations and something that's ultimately harmless. But it basically has to be wrong enough to surprise us, but safe enough that we can enjoy it. So something like baseball players dancing, well, that's a violation, but also, nobody's getting hurt, so that's pretty benign. So the result is basically what McGraw would call delightful.

So how about a guy hitting a baseball on stilts? Kind of a massive violation, but he's actually pretty good at it, so pretty damn benign. And the result is something you just can't look away from. But changing the rules of a one hundred and fifty-year-old sport, I guess you could say that's a violation on a scale that makes traditionalists physically uncomfortable. But the games are still competitive. The players are still talented. Nobody's getting cheated. So pretty benign, right?

And the awesome result is people care about baseball again. So what Jesse Cole intuited, and what McGraw's research supports, is that the boring version of baseball isn't actually safe at all. Boring is kind of its own kind of danger. Boring is why the median fan age for traditional baseball is fifty-seven and rising. Boring is why attendance keeps declining year over year. Boring is the slow death that everyone pretends isn't happening. The bizarre violations Jesse introduced aren't completely disrespectful to baseball, not really. They're a solid attempt to save it from the respectability that's killing it.

There's another related concept in psychology called the peak-end rule, discovered by Daniel Kahneman. It turns out that when we remember experiences, we don't remember the average of how we felt throughout. Instead, we remember the peak moment and the end. Everything else is, you know, kind of fuzzy and doesn't really get remembered at all. Traditional baseball has almost no peaks. Not that they don't have any, but, you know, they're pretty sparse. It's basically three hours of low-level sameness. Nothing really demands your attention. But Banana Ball, on the other hand, it's engineered for peaks. Every game has moments. Every game has a story. Jesse Cole basically restructured the entire game of baseball to be memorable. So here's where we are now. The Savannah Bananas sold two million tickets last year. They have three point two million people on a waiting list. They sold out Fenway Park. They sold out an eighty-thousand-seat football stadium at Clemson. They literally crammed a baseball field into a football stadium with outfield walls at absurd distances, and fifty thousand people showed up. They have fifteen million followers on social media, more TikTok followers than every Major League Baseball team combined. Not more than any one team, more than all thirty teams added together, and they did it by embarrassing baseball, by naming a team after a fruit and getting booed for it, by putting players in kilts and having them dance, by hiring a guy on stilts who couldn't really play baseball, by changing rules that hadn't been changed in a century, because the sacred version of baseball was dying. The respectful version was losing fans every year. So sometimes the most respectful thing you can do for something you love is embarrass the hell out of it, shake it loose from its own self-seriousness, and remind it that it's supposed to be fun.

Dum, dum, dum, dum, Dumb Word of the Day. Dumb Word of the Day. It's a word. It's dumb. Use responsibly.

[upbeat music] And now, as always, we have to do our important scholarly work. It's time for Dumb Word of the Day, and today's dumb word is

eutrapelia.... spelled E-U-T-R-A-P-E-L-I-A, eutrapelia, which kind of sounds like a prescription medication or a small European country that maybe produces nothing but cheeses and emotional damage. But eutrapelia is actually an old word that Aquinas used, and it means something like the virtue of playfulness. Not being childish, not being irresponsible, but playfulness as a virtue, as a legitimate human skill. The ability to sort of keep things light, to make room for humor, to relieve tension, to not treat every moment like a performance review. And I love that someone had to label this as a virtue because it means that even back then, people were like, "Excuse me, are we allowed to have fun? Is that legal? Should we write this down?" Eutrapelia is basically the philosophical permission slip to do what the Savannah Bananas do instinctively: make it playful, make it human, make it feel like something fun.

So the next time you feel guilty for wanting to add a little ridiculousness to your work, just whisper to yourself, [gentle music] "I'm practicing eutrapelia," and then immediately feel insufferable because you just whispered Aquinas at Starbucks. [upbeat music] So here's my challenge for you this week, and I'm calling it How Now, Sacred Cow? Think about something in your life, your job, your hobby, your industry, your family traditions, something that everyone just treats as serious and unchangeable. Something where people use words like, "That's just how it's done," or, "We've always just done it this way." And then I want you to ask yourself a very Jesse Cole kind of question: What are the boring parts? Not the important parts, the boring parts, the parts that exist because they've always existed, not because anyone actually likes them. The meetings that go too long, the rituals that nobody enjoys, the rules that made sense once and just create friction. Pick one, just one, and imagine, what if you made it ridiculous or more fun? Not eliminated it necessarily, just find a way to make it more ridiculous and more fun. Maybe by adding dancing, or maybe changing the rules, or better yet, naming the entire thing after an exotic fruit that rhymes with the task at hand. Whatever it is, the goal is for the experts in your life to tell you that what you're suggesting is not only silly, but potentially disrespectful, that you're cheapening their sacred cow. That's how you'll know you're really onto something. And bonus points if you record the ridiculousness and send it our way, unless, of course, it's illegal. In that case, lose my number. [upbeat music] And that's our show. Thank you for getting dumb with me today. I'm your host, David Carson. If you want more eutrapelian thinking delivered straight to your inbox every week, consider subscribing to the Dumbify newsletter at david-carson.com. Until next time, stay curious, stay ridiculous, and remember, sometimes the only way to save and improve something you love is to embarrass the hell out of it. Unless it's your mom, or your kids, or the mailman who gives your dog treats but refuses to bring large packages to your door. In that case, just let it go. This is David Carson, signing off from the beautifully chaotic world of benign violations, where a guy on stilts can make the roster, a team named after a fruit can outsell the Yankees, and the most respectful thing you can do is refuse to take anything too seriously. [upbeat music]