In this episode, I dig into Jesse Cole’s book “Banana Ball“.
Full Transcript:
Mickey Mellen (00:01.336)
To me, Savannah Bananas was absolute perfection. I wish I could say everyone else in town shared my enthusiasm. You should all be fired. Throw the owner out of town. This is the worst name we’ve ever heard of.” Those were some of the more gentle reactions. Initially, the criticism got to me, maybe at least in part because we were so invested. So that was a little bit from Jesse Cole’s book, Banana Ball, about the history of the Savannah Bananas baseball team. I’m excited to share some of it with you today. I recently attended a game and it was quite an experience. If you’ve not been before, it’s baseball, but with a lot of
really crazy rules. Probably the weirdest part to me, the craziest part, the most exciting part was that the music and the party they had didn’t stop. They had all this pregame stuff going on and it was impressive but then I figured okay the game’s gonna start, let’s settle in and the music just kept on blaring through the hitters and everything else. It was unreal. was quite the experience. They have a two hour time limit so they pack the energy and let it go. What the Savannah Bananas have done is amazing. mean this was at Truist Park in Atlanta, a professional baseball stadium. did a couple exhibition games there.
and they sold out with a waitlist a mile long. The Braves haven’t sold out a game this season, I don’t think, and they sold out easily. It’s just such an experience, it’s such a road he’s taken. Jesse Cole bought this team some years ago and struggled for years and now it’s turned into something just amazing. This book chronicles that journey of his. I’m gonna share just a few things from the book that I thought were pretty interesting.
Mickey Mellen (01:21.57)
So first he talks about his personal energy list. I thought this was a great way to look at things. So coming from the book he says quote, keep a personal energy list. I divide the list into three buckets. One is creating, which is coming up with new ideas and promotions. Another is sharing, which is doing an interview, giving a keynote speech, or doing a podcast. The third is growing, which is listening to podcasts, reading a book, or learning something from an outside industry. So he knows, a lot of you have probably heard before that,
They say, you know, you gotta manage your time and that’s sort of true, but really you need to manage your energy. And so he divides his energy into different buckets, depending on his energy levels and figures out what to do to make sure he gets things done. You know, he needs to create, he needs to share, he needs to grow. So he sets up time to do all three of those. And again, it’s worked out very, very well for him. Another thing he talked about was his ghost mentors. You know, I’ve written before in my blog and other places about your personal board of directors. You can kind of build a board of directors of people that don’t know they’re on your board of directors. They may not even be living.
But you can just look to them for inspiration, read about them, learn about their life, think about how they make decisions and go from there. And he did that as well. He talked about this in the book. said, Meanwhile, I also lean on my ghost mentors, Walt Disney, PT Barnum and Bill Beck, who talk about showmanship, attracting attention and having fun. But Ken, someone else he worked with clearly, but Ken, someone else he worked with clearly put me in a position to make things happen. So again, having that board of directors to yourself, that you can just look to these people say, what kind of decision
What would Walt Disney make in this case? What would he do to make things more exciting? It’d be a great way to look at things and again, it served these guys very well building the team here. Another thing I talked about when they were building that Savannah Bananas logo, and I mentioned that opening clip when they named the team the Savannah Bananas, they took a lot of heat for it and again, it’s worked out very well. They had a friend named Dan that was making the logo for him, it’s really an infamous logo at this point. And so from the book he said, quote, I remember asking Dan, how many different renderings do we get? And Dan said, you will get one.
I was pretty surprised. Dan said he wouldn’t miss it. In fact, he said, it will be exactly what you want. And turns out it was. I when they showed him the logo, they loved it. It was perfect. And again, that’s what we’ve seen for years. Kind of reminds me of Steve Jobs when he left Apple for a while there, was forced out of Apple, worked at Next and founded the Next company. He had a logo there where Paul Rand charged him $100,000, which Jobs had to pay up front and he got exactly one logo out of it. Not suggesting you all do this. You we build logos for people or design logos for people. We don’t charge $100,000.
Mickey Mellen (03:40.174)
We also give some options, kind of talk through things, but there are cases where if someone has a vision for what they want, you build exactly what it needs to be and just go with it. Don’t waste your time doing other versions and stuff. And that worked well for Next and worked well for the Savannah and Bananas and can be a great thing. Another thing you talked about was the opposite of friction. This was a very interesting point, kind of a longer quote, but I thought this was great. So here’s what he said here. He said, quote, here’s what I don’t understand about many businesses. Why do they continually do things that their customers hate? Why are people endlessly put on hold while a message plays that tell them how
Important their call is but they do a slow burn while waiting to talk to an actual human being and still they may be hanging up in frustration in the bananas Organization, we have a word for this friction We looked at all the friction points from a baseball experience ticket fees price gouging on parking in the sessions as well as limited access to autographs and fan photos of their favorite players and we did the opposite and Again, if you’ve attended a game of theirs, they do the opposite of so many things They made the rules faster. You know, a lot of people complain baseball can be too slow at times They did things make it faster. They keep prices down low
They give access to the team. mean, just we were in the upper deck of Truist Park and generally the bananas play in smaller fields. So we were in a very, very big park way up in the upper deck. And there were, I don’t know, eight or 10 different mascots and people and Jesse Cole himself that came up to our section and interacted with the fans. They did it all throughout the stadium. There dozens and dozens of people going around to interact while the game was going on and the music was happening. And there were people dancing in the field and all the craziness. They made sure what’s the friction people experience.
They literally found every piece of friction they could and do the opposite and I’m sure they’re looking for more to continue that and it’s a Fantastic way to look at things and again has served them very well Looking a bit further he was talking about the Negro leagues in part of the book here And what they said here is he said quote we stood at silent attention as Bob a gifted speaker explained to us that American historians in the past never view the Negro Leagues Never viewed the Negro leagues as truly professional. He said if you don’t control the pen, you don’t control the story
meaning so much of the Negro League story went unnoticed. The Negro Leagues were a very important part of baseball that did get better recognized decades later when things happened, again, because they didn’t control the pen, they didn’t control the story, they couldn’t tell their story back in the day. Of course, we’re in a much better era now where you can, you do control the pen, you can tell the story.
Mickey Mellen (05:55.723)
I’m speaking this podcast right now from my house for a cost of essentially zero. I mean you can do the same thing. You can control the pen. You can write a blog post. can share on social media. You can do so much now. And it’s very unfortunate that things like the Negro League struggled so much and just were unnoticed really for so long because they weren’t able to control the story. And just be thankful we’re a place where we can. And I encourage you of course to tell the story. And then just the last thing I’m going to share. And again I encourage you to check out this book for yourself. It’s a great read. He’s an excellent writer and tells the story. Just very compelling from
how we got from the early struggles to where they are now into this amazing place they are. So I’ll encourage you to check that out. But the last thing I’ll share, he talks about being professional, what it looks like to be a professional. And they try not to be too professional. They’re not a professional league. I don’t think they have any plans to be. They have great ball players. mean, a lot of minor league players, even some former major league stars you might know, but they’re not gonna compete with major league teams. They’re not trying to, but they’re doing something different. They’re wanting to entertain and stuff, and so they don’t necessarily try to be quote professional.
He says in the book, says, quote, some people won’t take anyone or anything seriously unless they’re buttoned up and professional. Well, I have a different perspective about that. I don’t believe anybody comes home and says, honey, I met the most professional person today. She was just so professional. I don’t think we get excited about being professional. We get excited, I think we get excited about memorable, unique, fun, and different. And that’s what the bananas are. They are memorable, unique, fun, and different. And so I encourage you, you ever get a chance to go attend one of their games, which if you ever see tickets are gonna be on sale or in a lottery, you have to jump early. You can’t just.
show up and get tickets. It is very, hard to get into the games despite them playing games all the time in all these different cities and doing so much. It’s tough to get in. So if you’re able to get in, get in. But in the meantime, check out Banana Ball from Jesse Cole. Fantastic book. I think you’ll pick up a lot from it. So hope you enjoyed this. We’ll be back with a guest again in a couple of weeks and we’ll see you then. Thank you so much.
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