Ryan Kellogg Traded a Cubs Uniform for a Green Tutu to Coach the Savannah Bananas
- Ryan Kellogg pitched in the Chicago Cubs system after Arizona State before an independent-ball stop pointed him toward the Savannah Bananas in 2022.
- His first season required him to put on a green tutu for a routine built around a three-year-old fan, a moment nobody warned him about in advance.
- Kellogg now works as the Bananas’ pitching coach, teaching the next wave of arms the same balance of competitive baseball and live performance he had to learn himself.
A Left-Hander Who Had Never Danced Learns to Move in Front of 12,000 People
Ryan Kellogg stands 6-foot-6. He pitched at Arizona State, spent time in the Chicago Cubs system after Chicago picked him in the fifth round of the 2015 draft, and represented Canada internationally. He started college as a mechanical engineering major and still calls himself a numbers-and-logic guy. None of that screamed “green tutu.”
Kellogg first heard about Banana Ball in 2022 while playing independent baseball alongside Dalton Cornett, now a member of the Firefighters. Cornett kept telling teammates about a strange new version of baseball he was about to join. Dancing. Singing. A national tour. The reaction in a clubhouse full of traditional pro pitchers was blunt: what is that?
Kellogg had spent his whole career being taught the opposite lesson. Stay quiet. Give up a hit, throw the next pitch. Give up a home run, throw the next pitch. Do the job and keep your face still.
Then his own plans changed. A job he expected fell through while he and his wife were on vacation in Mexico, and he started calling around for anywhere that would let him keep pitching. A friend mentioned the Savannah Bananas needed an arm. Kellogg knew just enough about Banana Ball to hesitate. What settled it was a phone call to Connor Higgins, a fellow Arizona State product already on the roster, who told him he was having the time of his life. Kellogg signed. He still wasn’t fully sold.
The Green Tutu Arrives on Day One
Kellogg drove close to 15 hours to Oklahoma City to join the team. Someone handed him a green tutu almost immediately.
He asked what it was for.
Third inning, they told him. Toddlerography.
“That’s not a word,” Kellogg said.
It didn’t matter. A three-year-old walked onto the field, and whatever she did, Kellogg and two teammates had to copy in front of roughly 12,000 people who had paid to see exactly this kind of thing. Kellogg says he had never danced in his life before that afternoon.
The transformation kept building from there. Kellogg had dressed as Napoleon Dynamite once in college. Team founder Jesse Cole heard the story and asked if Kellogg knew the character’s famous dance. He didn’t. Cole told him he was going to learn it. Kellogg practiced for weeks, not minutes, and eventually had to pitch six full innings in Milwaukee knowing that the moment his outing ended, he would strip off his yellow jersey, reveal a Vote for Pedro shirt underneath, and perform the routine in front of the whole crowd.
He got through the sixth inning clean. A teammate closed it out with a backflip. The music started, the jersey came off, and the Party Animals sat down on their own bench to watch him work. Kellogg called it the longest two minutes of his life. He finished the dance anyway.
From the Mound to the Coaching Staff
Kellogg describes his old personality as scientific and analytical, built around a mound where he already felt fully in control. Dancing in front of thousands of strangers was a different kind of exposed. “That was not just stepping outside my comfort zone,” he said. “That was jumping out of my comfort zone.”
Today Kellogg is the Savannah Bananas’ pitching coach. The pitcher who once needed a phone call from a college teammate just to sign now spends his days convincing new arms that giving up a run and immediately performing a bit for the crowd are not opposite instincts. They can live in the same inning.
That path fits a pattern across Banana Ball’s roster. Players arrive from affiliated systems, independent leagues and college programs with traditional training, then get handed a costume, a walk-up bit or a between-innings routine with almost no notice. What separates the Bananas from a straight comedy act is that the baseball underneath stays real. Kellogg still has to build a pitching staff capable of winning Banana Bowl race games against five other Championship League teams. The tutu and the outs are not in tension. They both count.
Kellogg’s own numbers from his affiliated days back that up. He posted a 3.03 ERA and a 1.08 WHIP across 23 starts for the Single-A South Bend Cubs in 2016, a season that came a year after Chicago drafted him out of Arizona State. That is not the resume of a player who stumbled into professional baseball. It is the resume of someone who had already proven he could get hitters out before anyone asked him to dance.
Now he is on the other side of that lesson, teaching it to whoever shows up next with a fastball, a scouting report and absolutely no idea what toddlerography means.
Kellogg is not the only pitcher on the Bananas’ staff who came up through a conventional system before signing on with a team that asks its players to dance between innings. But coaches shape a staff differently than players do. Every bullpen session Kellogg runs now carries a second lesson underneath the mechanics: the crowd is part of the game, not an interruption to it. A young reliever who flinches at the idea of a costume bit gets the same story Kellogg tells about Milwaukee, the yellow jersey and the two longest minutes of his life. Most come around. Kellogg did.
Cornett, the teammate who first talked Kellogg into giving Banana Ball a look, is still with the organization as a member of the Firefighters. Higgins, the Arizona State teammate whose phone call tipped the decision, remains on the Bananas’ roster as well. The three of them arrived through the same independent-ball grapevine and stayed for the same reason: a version of baseball where the box score and the bit both matter, and neither one gets to skip the other.
Sources:
- Savannah Bananas On SI, “Former Cubs Pitcher Ryan Kellogg Wasn’t Sure About the Savannah Bananas: Then Came a Green Tutu”
- MiLB.com and Baseball-Reference player records for Ryan Kellogg
