CHICAGO — The hottest ticket for a game in town isn’t for the Chicago Cubs or White Sox.
A new barnstorming league of dancing ballplayers making national headlines and packing football stadiums for reimagining the stodgy rules of America’s pastime have sold out Sox Park for two nights between Aug. 15-16.
More than 182,000 people applied to a lottery just for the chance to buy tickets to see the Savannah Bananas play one of their traveling foils, The Firefighters, at Sox Park for the debut of “Banana Ball” in Chicago this summer.
But less than half of local Banana Ball hopefuls who applied for seats last winter were awarded a chance to buy tickets earlier this month. All 81,230 tickets recently sold out in under four hours, Savannah Bananas spokesman Sam Bauman said in an email.
Bananas games have featured players performing backflips before catches, batting on stilts and taking mid-game breaks for choreographed dances that often include the umpires.
Bunting leads to an immediate ejection and walks are replaced by “sprints,” where all fielding players must touch the ball before they can tag out a runner who took off on ball four. Other zany rules include an extra inning “showdown” played only with a pitcher, hitter and one fielder.
Any foul ball caught by a fan on the fly is an out. The league plays with yellow baseballs.
The Chicago series — which by Banana rules cannot drag the notoriously slow game longer than two hours — have start times of 7 p.m. both nights.
The spectacle has drawn comparisons to the Harlem Globetrotters and Taylor Swift’s world tour for the scorching demand for tickets. Limited resale tickets on StubHub for the Chicago games were running from $221-$4,796 as of Thursday. The average face value ticket was $40-60, Bauman said.
The Bananas have sold out 17 MLB stadiums and three football stadiums so far this year.
The games have often brought out celebrities and beloved former big leaguers taking the field with the Bananas.
“While we can’t reveal any secrets you can always expect a fun surprise (or five) that ties into the cities we visit,” Bauman said about the Chicago games.
The struggling White Sox, who lost a Major League record 121 games last season, sold out its Mexican Heritage Night earlier this month and a game last season when the Dodgers and two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani came to town.
“The Sox needed the No. 1 player on the planet to do that. And now the Bananas have done it twice,” said Marc Ganis, a sports business expert and consultant. “The average age of a baseball fan is very high compared to the NBA and the NFL. And this is a new combination of entertainment and sports, kind of like what wrestling has been, that people are enjoying, especially young fans.”
Mike Fraser, a Chicago local who runs competitive Skee-Ball leagues for a living, got his hands on the slippery Bananas tickets through a “multiple-step process” that led him to a 30-minute online window to buy five of them.
He’s planning so far to take his wife and 3-year-old son. Fraser said he hasn’t seen this kind of hoopla for tickets since hit play “Hamilton” came to Chicago.
“The amount of demand there is makes it even more exciting. It’s like a club with a long line out front that makes you want to get in it,” Fraser said. “But truly the intention behind this for me is to provide my kid with a long-lasting memory surrounding baseball, to instill that passion.”
Fraser, a lifelong Sox fan, said he’s largely stopped going to games out of “fatigue.”
“With baseball games you always know what to expect,” Fraser said. “The Bananas make fun the priority.”
Ganis believes the success of the Bananas is more than just a flash in the pan. The team, which started in 2015 scraping by in a run-of-the-mill college summer league, is now valued as a multi-million dollar business.
“The Harlem Globetrotters sold out arenas for decades all around the world,” Ganis said. “People won’t go see 81 games a year, but maybe one or two. The concept works. It’s sports entertainment.”
The White Sox are inviting people to join a wait list for “limited ticket inventory to sell for premium seating.”
For those who can’t get inside: ESPN2 is broadcasting the Aug. 15 game.
The White Sox, who had already lost 55 games as of Thursday, will be out of town that day playing the middling Kansas City Royals.
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