The Banana’s asked one fundamental question to revive a defunct minor ball team. What do fans hate about going to a game?

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick in business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients, so here’s one of those.

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Dave Young:

Welcome back to the Empire Builders podcast. Dave Young here alongside Stephen Semple, and as you know, this is the time when we usually have Stephen whisper the topic of the podcast into my ear. But today I’m turning the table, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:

You are?

Dave Young:

Uh-huh. We’re going to talk about one that I’m sort of interested in right now.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, and I’m excited.

Dave Young:

I did tell you what it was. I mean, honestly, I will admit I told you what it was before.

Stephen Semple:

Well, we had a conversation last time I was in Austin and you mentioned this business, and I started doing a little bit of looking into it and I thought, “Wow, we should talk about this.” But since you had already had a lot of knowledge on it, I was like, “Dave, we should talk about this.”

Dave Young:

I mean, cool, huh?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah,

Dave Young:

It’s really kind of interesting.

Stephen Semple:

So let everybody know what we’re talking about.

Dave Young:

We’re talking about baseball, sort of. Sort of baseball. It’s a new form of baseball called Banana Ball.

Stephen Semple:

Just before you had told me about it, I’d heard about someone else had mentioned it to me and I thought it was pretty fascinating. But give us a background on Banana Ball.

Dave Young:

So this guy named Jesse Cole and his wife buy this summer baseball league team in Savannah, Georgia that had gone belly up, I think before maybe they were called the Sand Gnats or something like that.

Stephen Semple:

Okay, so basically it was a defunct, bankrupt out of business junior baseball team.

Dave Young:

I think the kind of league that plays summer times with college kids.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

So it came with the stadium, right?

Stephen Semple:

Okay.

Dave Young:

Whoever owns the franchise gets use of the stadium. So they spent a couple of years just trying to figure out how to make baseball more interesting.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Here you’ve got this weird little baseball team that nobody’s been able to make succeed.

Stephen Semple:

Okay, before you go any deeper, Dave, how sold out are they?

Dave Young:

Dude for the 2025 season, they’ve got more than a million people on their waiting list.

Stephen Semple:

On their waiting list.

Dave Young:

These are people that are saying, “Please, please let me buy a ticket.”

Stephen Semple:

Right, right. Think about this. Wouldn’t you love to have a baseball team that not only is sold out, you have a million people on the waiting list hoping for tickets. And this is not a major league team.

Dave Young:

This is in Savannah, Georgia in a stadium that’s just basically, it is not even fully surrounding the field.

Stephen Semple:

I just wanted people to understand the success this team is having.

Dave Young:

Here’s the really cool thing. Their success is not based on wins and losses.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

It’s based on entertaining people. This guy understands customer experience to a deep, deep level. And what he was looking at, and he’s a baseball player, he coached. Baseball flows in his blood, but he looked at it and he is like, “What are the things that people hate about baseball?” Right? And this is actually one of the little social media snippets that really got my attention was when he said, “What do your customers hate? What do your customers hate about doing business with you or doing business in your category? Find out those things and get rid of those things.”

Stephen Semple:

Right? In marketing parlance, we call that friction.

Dave Young:

Right, you get rid of the friction. So he looks at baseball, number one, what do people hate? You buy a ticket to a baseball game or a concert or anything else, and there’s tax listed on it and there’s ticketing fees listed on it. And you’re like, “Just tell me the price of the damn ticket.”

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

So he said, “We’re going to cover that. We’re going to cover the tax and we’re not going to have any fees because we’re going to put our own system in.”

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Right? So now you can buy a ticket with no fees and things like that attached, so you’re cool with that. You hate buying food at a ballpark, right? So they started, every ticket you buy was all-inclusive, all you could eat.

Stephen Semple:

Wow.

Dave Young:

So you go to the ball game and you want a hot dog here, have an extra one to take back your seat with you, right? Have a couple of hamburgers, whatever it is you want. It’s part of the ticket price. So you could take your whole family there. You know what the tickets are going to cost, you know what you’re going to spend on food, which is zero additional dollars and have a good time.

And then they started looking at what do people hate about the game? And baseball games are too unpredictable, and they may go way longer than you anticipated spending watching a baseball game.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Right? There’s extra innings. The batter always just takes a steps back out of the batter’s box right when the pitcher’s ready to pitch and then the manager goes out to the pitcher’s mound or the catcher goes out to the pitcher’s mound, and they have a little conversation. Maybe they’re going to swap out pitchers and just it’s all this time suck.

Stephen Semple:

It’s interesting because I was just looking up these guys started in 2016, and I’m not a huge baseball fan.

Dave Young:

Me either.

Stephen Semple:

But I seem to recall it was a few years ago that they changed some of the rules in baseball to sort of speed the game up.

Dave Young:

Oh, yeah, we’re getting there.

Stephen Semple:

Okay, all right.

Dave Young:

We’re getting there.

Stephen Semple:

Okay.

Dave Young:

In fact, two years ago they dropped the college baseball team. They’re like, “No, we’re not going to participate in that league anymore. We’re doing our own thing.”

Stephen Semple:

Wow.

Dave Young:

They became an independent.

Stephen Semple:

Completely independent.

Dave Young:

And they don’t play baseball anymore. They play Banana Ball, right? And there’s a difference. And there are some diehard baseball people out there that hate this. Now we also say, right, if you have detractors that are just as vocal as your biggest fans, you’re doing something right.

Stephen Semple:

You are actually. Yeah.

Dave Young:

Right? And so the kind of baseball nerds that sit in the stands and keep score on their own scorecard or watch TV, those are the baseball nuts that love the game for the statistical relevance and the order and the beauty of the numbers, right?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Young:

And the rest of us are like, “I just want to see a fun game.”

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Right? I want to go out to the ballpark. I want to have a good time. I want to forget my troubles. I don’t want to sit there and watch some guy do practice swings and step out. And I’m doing this all from memory. They created the rules of Banana Ball, and Banana Ball is just played a little bit differently so they have a strict time limit.

Stephen Semple:

So going back to your whole thing, what do people hate? One of the things they don’t like is the unpredictability of when it starts and when it ends. They want it to be more like a movie. Here’s when it starts. Here’s where it ends. Okay.

Dave Young:

If I go to a baseball game and it goes into extra innings, right, I may be there for three, three and a half hours.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

You don’t know. So these guys put a time limit. If the game starts at seven, it’s going to be done by nine.

Stephen Semple:

Right, so it starts at seven ends at nine, done. Okay.

Dave Young:

No extra innings. They have their own means of breaking ties ...