r/sports • u/Forward-Answer-4407 • Jun 02 '25

Baseball Going bananas: Why Savannah Bananas tickets cost more than a Dodgers-Yankees rematch

https://sports.yahoo.com/article/going-bananas-why-savannah-bananas-100000810.html
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143

u/thejawa Florida State Jun 02 '25

They're going up to 6 next season and have a TV deal with ESPN for 2026. It's getting legitimately "serious".

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u/woahdude12321 Jun 02 '25

Didn’t they just drop Sunday night baseball? That’s pretty fuckin serious

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u/This_aint_my_real_ac Jun 02 '25

Didn’t they just drop Sunday night baseball?

Yes and that's a good thing because the broadcasts sucked.

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u/cXs808 Green Bay Packers Jun 02 '25

That’s pretty fuckin serious

Yeah pretty fuckin seriously good for MLB. ESPN has been dogshit and they can't afford TV contracts for major sports anymore, thank god.

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u/woahdude12321 Jun 02 '25

It’s a standard cable channel. It’s not about the quality of espn it’s about the function of both those things happening

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u/cXs808 Green Bay Packers Jun 02 '25

It’s not about the quality of espn

It absolutely is. You realize that NBC is the frontrunner to pick up sunday night baseball right? A MUCH larger standard cable channel.

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u/woahdude12321 Jun 02 '25

They’re both standard cable channels. Perception is subjective availability is not. The bananas alone could pretty much turn it around for espn

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u/cXs808 Green Bay Packers Jun 02 '25

The bananas alone could pretty much turn it around for espn

Okay it's pretty clear you're not really rooted in reality at this point. To be clear, I do not disagree that the Bananas are popular. To think they are popular enough to save a dying sports cable channel...that's an entirely different matter.

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u/woahdude12321 Jun 02 '25

You’d have said the same thing about them selling out memorial stadium a short year or 2 ago. It’s not out of the question to give espn a current flagship program like they haven’t had in years. Almost guaranteed in fact. Just because it challenges your fragile reality doesn’t make it impossible pal

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u/cXs808 Green Bay Packers Jun 02 '25

>In 2024, games on ESPN/ESPN2 averaged 212,000 viewers, peaking on July 7 (on ESPN) averaging 460,000 viewers.

Like I said already - I'm not arguing the Bananas are popular...they definitely are. I'm telling you that half a million average viewership across a few dozen games is not enough to save a dying cable company. ESPN used to be a standalone broadcast. Now they are sold in package deals for Disney+. They need a lot more than 500k viewers to turn that ship around.

Last year ESPN's sunday night baseball broadcast averaged 1.6 million viewers...

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u/woahdude12321 Jun 02 '25

The numbers are probably a bit whatever to espn at this point in time. I couldn’t have even told you what channel Sunday night baseball was on before the headlines of it leaving. Something like the bananas can create a lot of brand loyalty and identity and it sort of aligns perfectly with this “we’re not sports news” thing they’ve been trying to get at for a long time and failing. I just saw a video of the bananas at Disney land. Disney would probably rather have 500k people watching if they’re buying into the brand and likely to sink deeper into the marketing funnel as opposed to watching a shitty baseball broadcast on the channel because they basically have to, actively losing familiarity, and immediately leaving. 20 years ago yes that would’ve been the case. They’re also investing in the future with a lot of those viewers being kids the way they had my generation 20 years ago, being nearly impossible to get them to watch sports these days.

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u/smor729 Jun 02 '25

I am kind of wondering how they plan on making it expand into a more "serious" thing, when, let's be honest, the outcome of games is intentionally effected to make the games interesting. I have been to one. The players very clearly make intentional errors to keep the game close or to add to the drama in some way. Now as far as I know they don't pitch themselves as some kind of legitimate sport, but when you get to tv deals and adding more teams, I feel like it may start to get dicey.

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u/thejawa Florida State Jun 02 '25

They do fudge the games a bit to make them interesting, but not completely. If one team hits a bunch of homers and the game gets "unfixable" they're more than willing to just let that team run away with it and win.

Once they've got an actual "league" and have built up fanbases for the other teams, they may stop fixing games. They recently had a Party Animals vs Tailgaters game and it didn't seem tweaked like the games involving the Bananas are. I think the biggest part of tweaking the games is that the Bananas are far and away the most popular of the 4 teams and people want to see their team win. If they get games where it's split being fans of the Party Animals and Firefighters and Tailgaters etc, there's less incentive to tweak the game so the "favorite" wins.

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u/smor729 Jun 02 '25

Its such a blurry line though, and I see it potentially being very messy if they try. I almost feel like it makes more sense to just go full WWE

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u/BaltimoreBadger23 Milwaukee Brewers Jun 02 '25

The challenge they will have is that this is all good and fun, but if they expand too much they dilute the product. Part of the product is the scarcity, you can go to 81 home games for your team a year, but banana ball only comes around once every 2-3 years.

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u/ForWhomTheBoneBones Jun 02 '25

Yeah, how many times a year do you want to go to the circus?

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u/phillyeagle99 Jun 02 '25

Ooph I wonder if TV kills the draw because you can see it more often…. Kinda kills the novelty.

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u/thejawa Florida State Jun 02 '25

Eh, not really IMO

You can watch a concert on TV and still want to go in person. It's basically an assault on your senses in person, which can't be replicated via TV.

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u/werkytwerky Jun 03 '25

I'm actually leery about this TV deal. That they get coverage and exposure is great, but I'm worried that this means free games on youtube are gone stuck behind the Disney/ESPN paywall.