Jesse Cole Says Dave Matthews Band Shaped How Banana Ball Built Its Fans
- Savannah Bananas founder Jesse Cole says Dave Matthews Band’s touring model directly shaped how Banana Ball built its national schedule and its fan base.
- The comparison covers free YouTube broadcasts, a members-only K Club modeled on the band’s Warehouse program, and a live show that changes from night to night.
- Cole’s approach has helped push the team’s ticket waitlist past four million names as Banana Ball keeps adding stops on its 2026 tour.
A Baseball Team Started Taking Cues From a Jam Band’s Playbook
Most Banana Ball fans know Jesse Cole rebuilt an entire sport around dancing infielders and stolen first bases. Fewer know that one of his biggest influences never threw a pitch or swung a bat. In a recent podcast appearance, Cole credited Dave Matthews Band with shaping several of Banana Ball’s core decisions, from streaming games free on YouTube to building a members-only fan club and touring the country instead of waiting for fans to come to Savannah.
The connection is not about music. It is about how a touring act turns strangers into a community.
Touring Instead of Waiting for the Crowd to Show Up
When the Bananas walked away from a normal minor league schedule and started touring the country, they landed in cities where plenty of people had never heard of them. Rather than build a following through national television or wait for word to travel on its own, Cole leaned on an approach borrowed straight from Dave Matthews Band: put on a show good enough that fans do the marketing for you.
Long before headlining amphitheaters, Dave Matthews Band skipped the usual radio-hit path and built a following one show at a time, letting fans record and trade tapes that spread the band’s sound long before streaming existed. “They were differentiated by how they made people feel,” Cole said. He saw the blueprint and copied the instinct rather than the setlist.
Banana Ball fans do the same thing today with a different set of tools. A trick play, a between-innings dance or an unscripted fan moment gets filmed on a phone and posted to TikTok or Instagram within minutes, and that clip often reaches more people than the game itself.
Free Broadcasts and the K Club
Cole also pointed to Banana Ball’s decision to stream many broadcasts free on YouTube instead of locking them behind a paywall. “We’re leaving millions of dollars on the table,” he said, explaining that the team wants as many people as possible to experience the show firsthand. Giving away the product looks like lost revenue at first glance. Cole treats it as a discovery engine instead, a way to introduce Banana Ball to people who later buy tickets, join the fan club or bring family members to a live game. A viewer who watches a free broadcast tonight can become a ticket buyer next season, and a ticket buyer can become the person who convinces three friends to plan a trip around the next tour stop.
That fan club is the K Club, which Cole compared directly to the Warehouse, Dave Matthews Band’s long-running membership program that gives fans priority ticket access and exclusive merchandise. Banana Ball’s version faces a scale problem the band never had to solve at the same speed. According to Cole, the team’s ticket waitlist has grown past 4.2 million names, and the K Club itself has already topped 40,000 members with almost no paid promotion behind it, offering early ticket access and its own exclusive gear.
Renae Lipsmeyer, who hosts a podcast focused on Dave Matthews Band’s fan community, sees the same forces at work in both fan bases. “I think that the fandom itself is content,” she said. Fans don’t only watch. They travel for it, dress for it, film it and tell each other stories about it long after the show ends.
No Two Nights Look the Same
The deepest influence shows up every time the Bananas take the field. Dave Matthews Band built a reputation on never repeating a setlist across thousands of shows, giving longtime fans a reason to keep showing up even after seeing the band dozens of times. Cole wants that same pull for Banana Ball. “We do 10 to 15 brand-new things every single night,” he said, describing new dances, new entrances and new bits that mean a fan who has already been to five games still has no idea what happens at the sixth.
Lipsmeyer described the pattern in five words: “fan excitement generates fan excitement.” One person has a memorable experience, tells someone else, that person shows up curious, has their own moment, and the cycle repeats without anyone running a formal marketing campaign behind it.
Cole even pushed the Banana Band, Banana Ball’s in-house musicians, to learn Dave Matthews Band songs including “Ants Marching” and “Tripping Billies,” and he singled out his own saxophone player for bringing some of that sound into the ballpark. It is a small detail, but it shows how far the influence reaches beyond business strategy and into the actual sound inside the stadium.
As the Championship League heads toward the first Banana Bowl at Nationals Park on October 10, Cole’s touring philosophy is part of why six teams now play in front of sold-out crowds across dozens of cities instead of one. “I get to be a fan,” Cole said. “And I want our fans to feel what I get to feel.” For a franchise that started in a half-empty ballpark, that is the whole business model in one sentence.
None of it works without the willingness to give something away first. Free broadcasts cost real production money. A K Club membership that already exceeds 40,000 fans without heavy paid advertising behind it took years to build one signup at a time. Cole’s bet, the same one Dave Matthews Band placed decades earlier, is that a live experience good enough to talk about will eventually outperform any campaign built to sell it directly. Banana Ball’s six-team Championship League, its national tour and its climb toward a first Banana Bowl suggest the bet has paid off so far.
The comparison also explains why Banana Ball resists easy categorization inside pro sports. A traditional franchise sells a fixed product: nine innings, a home stadium, a season ticket plan built around scarcity of a different kind. Cole borrowed a touring band’s model instead, one where scarcity comes from limited stops in each city rather than limited access to any single game. Fans in Detroit, Lexington or Arlington get one weekend, not a full season, and the K Club exists partly to reward the ones willing to plan a trip around it.
Sources:
- Savannah Bananas On SI, “Why Jesse Cole Credits Dave Matthews Band With Helping Build the Savannah Bananas”
- The Banana Ball, ticket and K Club membership details
