RICH LOWRY: The joy of banana ball

Major League Baseball is currently debating various rules changes to improve the game, when what it really needs is more players wearing capes and doing backflips.

That, at least, is the lesson of Savannah Bananas, the team that has come up with a madcap version of baseball that is widely popular and selling out stadiums around the country.

The Bananas, or the Nanners, as devotees call them, sold out Clemson University’s Memorial Stadium in April, with 81,000 in attendance. Tickets for a couple of games at Yankee Stadium in September are selling on secondary sites at rates significantly higher than any Yankees game.

Who’s Yankee ace Max Fried compared to Dakota Stilts, the Bananas pitcher who bestrides the mound standing at 10 feet and 9 inches on, yes, stilts?

The Bananas and their handful of spinoff clubs have made the American pastime even more American. Banana Ball, currently on what it calls a “world tour,” is the baseball equivalent of the carnival coming to town. It taps into the barnstorming baseball tradition that goes back to the 19th century, into the antic spirit of minor-league baseball with its corny entertainment between innings, and into the showmanship of the Harlem Globetrotters.

Twerking and behind-the-back catches are encouraged.

The Bananas were originally part of the Coastal Plain League, a summer league for college ballplayers. When the team’s exhibition games with modified rules proved more popular than their standard fare, they went all exhibition.

We associate baseball with lazy summer afternoons, but there’s nothing lazy about Banana Ball. It takes everything dull or overly subtle about baseball and smashes it under foot while dancing to a pop song.

At the end of the day, does anyone besides the true connoisseur enjoy seeing a batter try to bunt? In Banana Ball, bunting is strictly prohibited and any attempt will get the offending batter ejected from the game.

In Banana Ball, after the pitcher issues a base-on-balls, every fielder besides the pitcher and catcher has to touch the ball before the runner can be tagged out. This creates an incentive for runners to run out of the batter’s box, and very often they reach second base.

Banana Ball, correctly, views incessant and unnecessary delay as the enemy of fan engagement. Batters can’t step out of the batter’s box. There are no visits to the mound. The game is timed and can’t last more than two hours.

In loud football stadiums, the fans are called “the 12th man.” In Banana Ball, the fans are literally the 10th fielder — if one of them catches a foul ball on the fly, the batter is out.

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America,” the French-American historian Jacques Barzun famously wrote, “had better learn baseball.”

Intellectuals aren’t going to rhapsodize about Banana Ball, but it says something about America, too. Its popularity shows how much we prize speed, constant entertainment and, oh yeah, viral moments on social media (which Banana Ball provides in abundance). Kids, in particular, love it.

We may not be arguing decades from now about who was the best Banana Ball player of this era. We can enjoy the spectacle all the same.

The supposed inventor of baseball, Abner Doubleday, got much right. So who can blame him for not realizing how much the game could be enhanced by adding musical numbers and having pitchers throw from trampolines?

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.