Homecoming: Savannah Bananas’ owner set to make new Fenway memories

BOSTON — Jesse Cole can’t — won’t — choose a favorite among his many Fenway Park memories.

There’s one of the first visits he can remember, when as a 5-year-old, he served as a Red Sox batboy for a day and was befriended in the dugout by Hall of Famer Lee Smith.

Or the time he played in the historic ballpark himself, pitching a 1-2-3 inning in a college summer league all-star game.

In between came the regular visits he made to Fenway with his dad, Kerry, and later with his high school buddies. Cole always got to the yard early to stake out a spot down the left-field line to snag wayward batting practice balls.

Credit: TNS

Credit: TNS

A new Fenway moment comes at 7 p.m. Saturday, when the Savannah Bananas — the barnstorming baseball team Cole and his wife, Emily, own — plays before a sellout crowd in the century-old ballpark. The Fenway date, which will be televised on the Bananas’ YouTube channel, is the second of six games the club will play in major league ballparks this season as Banana Ball accelerates toward a national obsession.

For Cole, who grew up in the small town of Scituate along Boston’s South Shore, the homecoming marks a new milestone. Banana Ball, a next-generation take on an old-fashioned game, is only five years old, and the Bananas’ true “baseball circus” roadshow launched only last year, playing 86 games in 33 cities. The Bananas have sold out every game in their history as a barnstorming club.

“I think my favorite Fenway memory is one that hasn’t been made yet,” Cole said. “This next one is a million times bigger.”

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Bringing it home

For Cole, the Bananas’ ballpark bucket list has always been one stadium long. The club has played at the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, New York, and at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, the oldest yard in America. The Bananas’ home field in Savannah, Grayson Stadium, is a nearly century-old treasure.

But as Banana-mania evolved from a Savannah novelty act to national phenomenon, Cole eyed Fenway. He made public his desire to play in major league stadiums in 2022 and singled out Fenway as a preferred destination.

Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution

The interest in the Boston game is what Cole labels “next level.” Fenway seats 37,000. The Bananas received 200,000 ticket requests for the game, and each applicant could request up to five seats. The club released a limited amount of additional seats — single seat and obstructed views — on Wednesday, and those sold within hours.

In Scituate, the locals who didn’t get tickets will gather at one of Cole’s old haunts, TKO Malley’s Sports Cafe, to watch the game. The Bananas’ Fenway debut was a Thursday lunchtime topic for the 17 members of the “Wordle Turtles,” a group of seniors who meet there daily for lunch. Their unofficial leader, bartender Amy DeLibero, lamented her failure to secure seats through the Bananas’ ticket lottery, a sentiment echoed around the bar.

Credit: Adam Van Brimmer

TKO Malley’s and the rest of Scituate’s downtown is tucked into a protected harbor, where kids ride bicycles kitted out to hold fishing rods. Cole spent many hours in his youth along the waterfront and the nearby beaches. His go-to restaurant, Maria’s Sub & Pizza, is a fixture at the south end of Front Street that’s been in operation since 1965 and is famous for its pizzas topped with linguica, a type of Portuguese sausage.

Credit: Adam Van Brimmer

His favorite spot is Greenbush Field, home of the Scituate Little League. Located next to a water treatment plant, the ballpark is scaled for pre-teens, with the fences 188 feet from home plate down the left-field and right-field lines and 200 to the left-field power alley.

Experiences at Greenbush and another nearby baseball facility, the South Shore Baseball Club in Hingham, shaped Cole and what would become the Bananas’ experience. On those fields is where Cole realized the fun of the game goes beyond bats, balls and gloves.

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‘A majority of one’

Cole played baseball after school every day and attended every summer camp the South Shore Baseball Club offered. He fondly remembers the activities and side competitions South Shore’s owner Frank Niles organized, such as running the bases backward and hidden cash baseball trivia.

Cole credits Niles’ “fun-first” approach to sparking his imaginative displays as the leader of the Bananas. Niles shrugs off such credit, and not just because he’s a baseball traditionalist who rolls his eyes at many of Cole’s Banana Ball innovations.

“He was a kid who never saw obstacles,” said Niles, a former professional player and coach who started the South Shore academy in 1989. “Jesse was a majority of one — if he thought it was right, that’s all he needed. It’s why he was such a good player and why he’s having the success he’s having now.”

Credit: Adam Van Brimmer

It’s also why Cole, as a 23-year-old general manager of a summer league baseball team in Gastonia, North Carolina, could be found manning the dunk tank before games. He’d been forced from the field and into the front office by a shoulder injury during his senior year pitching at Wofford College.

After absorbing the initial shock, Cole never pouted about the end of his playing career, said his father, Kerry. Jesse showed the same determination to make his life in baseball out of uniform as he did in it, eventually leading him to his now trademark yellow tux and bowler hat.

His mission? To make memories for fans.

“From Gastonia on, he’s tried anything and everything to make a better experience for the fans,” Kerry Cole said. “He’s never lost sight of that. And now he’s bringing it home to Fenway, where he has so many memories of his own.”