Getting dragged to all her big brother’s baseball games drove Sydney Dahlinger Bananas.
On Sunday, she took the wheel.
“It makes the game funner,” the 12-year-old explained to me on Blake Street, just before the Savannah Bananas played their Denver farewell Sunday at Coors Field.
“It’s hard to keep track of a baseball game. It can’t keep you interested the entire time. But they do the dances, the umps are fun … it just makes the game fun.”
What’s wrong with that?
While the Bananas sold out Coors twice over the weekend, the Rockies were busy getting stomped in Arizona by a combined score of 25-12. The Local Nine are on a pace to lose 120 games.
The sun shines along the Front Range everywhere but the corner of 20th & Bleak these days. LoDo could sure use some light. A little joy.
The Bananas are a barnstorming baseball team that’s about fans and fun first. The team’s got its own broadcast deals, including one with ESPN, 10.5 million followers on TikTok, and almost 4 million more on Instagram. (The Rockies’ Instagram feed had about 570,000 followers as of Sunday afternoon.)
They aren’t for everybody. In the bottom of the sixth of their tilt against The Firefighters, a guy standing on a barrel pitched to a batter swinging on stilts. An hour before first pitch, catcher Bill LeRoy warmed up by racing into the upper deck with the public-address microphone. From there, he launched in a banana-tossing contest — whoever could land more fruit inside a fan’s oversized pants down at field level was the winner. If that’s what you want when somebody takes you out to the ballgame, the ‘Nanas are in your wheelhouse.
Apparently, they’re in a bunch of wheelhouses. Coors Field has seen some lines. But Rockies security told me they’d never seen anything quite like Sunday morning, when a queue snaked from the corner of 21st and Blake, then stretched all the way behind the ViewHouse Ballpark before curling back to Gate D again.
Which is why Logan Dahlinger, 16, came up with his family from Arvada at 10:30 in the morning for a 3:30 p.m. first pitch.
“You come to a Rockies game, obviously, and you can kind of get in whenever and it doesn’t really matter,” Sydney’s older brother told me. “I can see why they’ve sold out football stadiums.”
After Sunday? So can I. Like hockey and auto racing, the Bananas are good television, but even better theater in person. It’s dance numbers, turntables, princesses, sleeveless jerseys, and right fielders in capes. It’s a group hug at the mound for foster kids. It’s Karaoke Night, every night. It’s the Frankenstein offspring of Abner Doubleday and P.T. Barnum, God’s answer to the eternal question of what would happen if Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball’s wooden commissioner, had a sense of humor and a soul.
It’s baseball blended with the unapologetic cornball of a state fair midway, the strut of pro wrestling, the wink of an NBA halftime show, the swing of a jazz funeral, and a pinch of Disney magic.
The dancing stops, but the music never does. When the PA plays “Time of My Life” from the movie “Dirty Dancing,” the DJ turns the music down so everybody singing along can finish the chorus themselves. If MLB is what we were, Banana Ball is who we are: loud, proud, deep-fried and buzzed. It’s the most American version of the National Pastime you’ll ever see.
The outcome’s determined by points, not runs, and showy stuff is worth more of the former. If a fan catches a foul ball, you’re out. Batters can’t leave the box. There’s a 2-hour time limit.
It’s also dang hard work. Routines are practiced before the gates open the morning of a day game, then again during warm-ups. The Bananas’ operation rolled into LoDo with two semis full of equipment and a crew of 140 traveling staffers.
Blake Street, meanwhile, immediately grasped the a-peel. Amy Holle of Erie even showed up dressed like a banana, a costume she said she’s taken skiing. Her husband, Eric, says he wears a gorilla suit when they hit the slopes, so yeah, Savannah is their jam.
“We’ve watched a little bit on YouTube so that the kids knew what to expect,” she said. “We keep telling our son that dancing is important. In case his baseball career doesn’t work, he’s got a fallback plan.”
It’s worked out for Correlle Prime. A 12th-round pick of the Rockies in 2016, the 6-foot-5 Florida native played at Grand Junction as a 19-year-old, where his teammates included Ryan McMahon, Jon Gray, Dom Nunez and Raimel Tapia. In 2014, he played behind Kyle Freeland and Antonio Senzatela in Ashland, N.C. Instead of getting on Jeff Bridich’s fast track, he wound up bouncing across leagues in three countries before hooking up with the Bananas.
Now 31, Prime doesn’t get star-struck often. He did a bit of a double-take this past Saturday night when he saw Peyton Manning sitting with son Marshall and Marshall’s friends in the home dugout at Coors. Cool dads do what cool dads gotta do.
“Are you going to do the ManningCast again?” Prime asked. “I can’t wait to see the ManningCast again.”
“Oh, yeah, we’re doing that again,” PFM replied. “Maybe Eli will try to come out when you guys are in New York in September.”
“That would be pretty cool,” Prime said.
The Bananas phenomenon went viral the old-fashioned way — word-of-mouth, friend to friend, sister to brother, a text at a time.
Founder Jesse Cole and his crew worked the algorithms the way Greg Maddux worked the corners, sprinkling YouTube, Instagram and TikTok posts that made the distracted curious. Once they dug deeper, they got hooked.
Banana Ball players get evaluated not just for their stats, but for their entertainment value, fan engagement, social media followings, et cetera. If MLB is about WAR power, Banana Ball is about star power.
Players have to bring something to the game-day experience besides a glove. The Texas Tailgaters’ James Taubi, for example, is a pitcher who also plays the violin.
“Being personable with a bunch of different fans, swooping down to kids, getting on their level, talking to them, taking photos, just taking time to really make people’s days and really brighten their day — that is really cool,” Correlle said. “The fans, they always ask about the dancing. ‘Can you backflip and do all that?’ It’s like, ‘Nah, I can’t do that.’”
Maybe next time, dude.
Speaking of next time, how about we do this again next summer?
“We’ll have to see,” Cole told me after the game. “But this has obviously made a great impression on all of us. Working with the team, the Rockies, working with the city has been tremendous. So we hope we can come back in the future.”
The Bananas have 200 offers right now for 20 dates in 2026. Loved the show. Don’t love those odds. Their schedule reveal is slated for Oct. 9.
“A lot of things have to work out for this to happen sooner than later, but we had a great experience,” Cole continued. “It was wonderful, and we’ll see what happens.”
It’s OK if you don’t get it. Sydney does. So does Logan, whose baseball games Sydney had to sit through.
“It’s hard to watch a full MLB game and truly stay excited for every pitch and every play,” Logan said. “What the Bananas have done is, they’ve kind of revolutionized it. You don’t have to know everything about baseball to enjoy it now. You just have to enjoy the idea of baseball.”
No, the Bananas wouldn’t beat the Rockies. Except at the box office. And in little kids’ hearts.
