The Savannah Bananas broke their all-time attendance record on Saturday night when a sold-out crowd of 81,000 people attended their game in Clemson’s football stadium.
The game itself was unlike anything these people had ever seen. Broadcast nationally on ESPN2, the temporary 190-foot short porch in left field led to nearly a dozen home runs. There were mid-game dances and a halftime performance. Outfielders caught flyballs while doing backflips, and fans even helped record outs by catching foul balls.
The Bananas have become baseball’s most polarizing team. Purists will tell you that it’s a silly idea, despite over a million fans showing up to their games last year.
Others say that the Bananas are re-running the same playbook that made the Harlem Globetrotters so popular in the 20th century. But all of these people are wrong. The Bananas are something entirely different. … Read More
Red Klotz, the founder and longtime coach of the Washington Generals, the Harlem Globetrotters’ perpetually feeble opponents, died at age 93 last week (I highly recommend Joe Posnanski’s remembrance). Klotz’s all-time record as a head coach of the Generals and their namesakes was something like six wins and 14,000 losses — they lost 99.96 percent of the time.
How exactly did the Generals lose so consistently? How much of it was their conceding games on purpose, as opposed to simply being really bad at basketball?
Let’s first get a sense for how good the Globetrotters were. … Read More
Red Klotz, the founder and longtime
ALDLAND 