How The Country's Goofiest Baseball Team Made Millions

[EasyAce]

The Savannah Bananas' Jesse Cole turned an unloved team into the hottest ticket in town. Now he has a lesson for every CEO who wants to turn a company around: Stop doing what people hate.
By Jennifer Miller
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/341830?fbclid=IwAR3k7DClysR2wLLgW8uoJyU0fpT3YkvUJWkQ1yByK19ccC3rz-cxTdG6EfI

Baseball is a game of tradition, and Grayson Stadium is as traditional as they come. The Savannah venue was built in 1926, back when game-day radio broadcasts were a new thing. The Boston Red Sox held spring training here, leading Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Jackie Robinson to round its bases. For three decades, a local high school also took Grayson’s field for its annual Thanksgiving Day game against a military academy. And between 1984 and 2015, it was home to a minor league team called the Sand Gnats. This was all baseball in its classic form -- orderly and staid, romanticized by purists.

Now? Things are a little different.

It’s the bottom of the second inning at Grayson Stadium on a muggy midsummer night this past August, and baseball is briefly on pause. The local team is now called the Savannah Bananas, and its four pitchers are lined up along the first-base line in their bright yellow uniforms, thrusting their hips back and forth to “That’s What I Like,” by Bruno Mars. Alex Degen, a 19-year-old pitcher from the University of Kentucky, is really getting into it. I got a condo in Manhattan. Degen thrusts left. Baby girl, what’s hatnin’? He thrusts right. Later, in the fourth inning, he’ll hand out roses to little girls in the stands. In the seventh, he’ll rip off his shirt atop the dugout.

And as he charms and preens, he’ll be just one part of a general circus atmosphere. They’ll toss oversize Dolce & Banana underpants into the crowd. A Summer Santa will drive a VW Bus around the bases. The break-dancing first-base coach will bust out his moves, and the team’s official, on-the-payroll high-fiving kid will high-five as many fans as possible. “I was shell-shocked when I first saw the Bananas,” says Degen, the pitcher, of his arrival in Savannah. “I was very skeptical. In college, baseball is serious. It took two weeks for me to realize this was fun.”

It didn’t come naturally to the team’s owner, either. Like many of his peers, he was once a baseball purist. Then, once he started investing in teams, baseball nearly wrecked his life. He was forced to sell his house and empty his savings account. He and his wife were $1.8 million in debt and sleeping on an air mattress. Things were desperate. But out of desperation came innovation. “We had to dramatically change the type of business we were in,” owner Jesse Cole says. “We needed to no longer be a baseball team; we needed to be an entertainment company" . . .