Podcast Alert: Jared Orton – Savannah Bananas

Transcript

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Jared Orton: [00:00:00] If you’re only able to come once or twice to a game, how can we still engage with you and bring you some fun and excitement? We are on that journey figuring out what it will take to make that broadcast experience appointment television tonight. Banana ball is on.

Anne Ristau: Welcome to the Navigating Sports Business podcast. I’m your host for today Anne Ristau. Co-head of Consulting at Navigate. We started this podcast to showcase some of the incredible people that we get to interact with every day and the impactful work that they’re doing in our industry. We hope you learn something about them and something from them in our conversation.[00:01:00]

Today I am absolutely thrilled to be joined by Jared Orton, president of the Savannah Bananas. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jared.

Jared Orton: Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. Glad to do it.

Anne Ristau: Jumping right in the Savannah Bananas, you’ve redefined baseball. I think a lot of folks do know your origin story, but there still are people who haven’t yet heard of you or know how it all began.

Can you take us to the beginnings?

Jared Orton: Yeah, absolutely. I think what, people see now on social media, if you follow us on whichever channel you decide to follow the Bananas on, you see this kind of social media phenomenon thing with dancing players and back flips and. Guys on stilts and dancing, first base coach and twerking umpires and senior citizen dance teams and all that.

And you know what people probably don’t know if you’ve [00:02:00] just become a fan recently is, yeah, this thing started in 2015, 2016, as just a hope and a prayer that we could start a little baseball team in Savannah, Georgia, where the stadium has sat here for almost a hundred years, actually coming up on a hundred years where minor league affiliated baseball had been declared, basically done dead failure, et cetera, and we came in and started what was at the time.

If people are familiar with Cape Cod League or anything like that, a summer collegiate baseball team. So not even professional baseball, not affiliated, nothing like that. A college summer wooden bat league team with college players for 10 weeks during the summer, and we named the team Savannah Bananas and people thought we were idiots when we brought college Summer league here, and certainly [00:03:00] thought we were idiots when we named the team Savannah Bananas.

But what I always share with people is. Our mission and our, our purpose has always been to make baseball fun. Whether we were in that original traditional college, summer, wooden and bat league, or now, today, 2024, when it’s totally shifted to Banana Ball and new rules and new teams and party animals and all that stuff, that central thread has always been, let’s make baseball fun and so.

That origin story goes all the way back to 2015, 2016, and it was all fun. It was all skits and all bits, but it was not even close to what it is today here in in 2024.

Anne Ristau: And you have the title of Fun executive at the Gastonia Grizzlies. Was this the groundwork for what would become the Savannah Bananas?

Jared Orton: Oh my gosh. You’ve done your research. That’s [00:04:00] ridiculous. 2012 I, I got to meet Jesse Cole, who is the guy in the yellow tuxedo, his, actually girlfriend at the time, Emily, who’s now become his wonderful wife, they were running a team in Gastonia, North Carolina, as you mentioned. Also college summer wooden bat league.

And the only way we got introduced was we had a mutual baseball coach. So Scott Brickman was my coach at Belmont Abbey was previously Jesse’s coach at Wofford, and I went to Scott Coach Brickman and just said, look, coach, love playing baseball. Let’s just be honest. I’m not going to be a professional baseball player by any sense of the imagination.

People always ask, did you play baseball in college? And I very kindly say, well, I was on the team. There’s a big difference between being on the team and playing and went to coach and just said, do you know anybody in the business of baseball and sports and all [00:05:00] that? He said, yeah, I used to coach this guy, Jesse.

He runs the team down the street. You should meet him. And at that time, Emily was the director of fun, and I got hired as the fun executive, which basically meant he just did everything, sold tickets, did the mascot, and swept up the crumbs after the game, and picked up trash and dressed up in costumes. And I wore a mullet and a polo and a some American flag

shorts. That was my outfit on game night at the stadium there. But what I learned was to be able to meet people and to entertain and put on a show and what it meant to create memories for people and tell the story and just get out there and try to do the thing. And that experience is just so valuable.

And I fell in love with that idea that we could use entertainment and sports and bring ’em together and create something hopefully magical [00:06:00] for people.

Anne Ristau: That’s a pretty awesome on-ramp into sports business, which many who would love to continue as athletes find themselves doing. Okay. Do you own any yellow tux or does only Jesse get to wear that?

Jared Orton: When I first met him, I believe he had transitioned from a black tux to a yellow tux. When we were in Gastonia, actually, he, he started sporting the yellow tux there. Now I have transitioned to no more mullets or American flag shorts, but I, I have a few sets of banana print dress pants that I wear at the games that people have a lot of fun with.

So have seen seen those

Anne Ristau: in your LinkedIn? The green with the yellow’s,

Jared Orton: that’s it. He wears the yellow tux, I wear the banana pants and we all fit right in.

Anne Ristau: Amazing. I often hear the Savannah Bananas described as the Harlem Globe Trotters, but baseball. But I think one of the big misconceptions out there is that you’re not performance only, you are competing and the games are real.

Do you like the comparison and, and what [00:07:00] role does competition play in Savannah Bananas and Banana Ball.

Jared Orton: That’s fantastic. We have certainly enjoyed the description of the Harlem Globe Trotters because of the innovation that they brought and the showmanship and the excitement that they brought to so many people and so many different countries and around the world and the game of basketball in general, and where we began to understand the Globetrotters.

If you want to do something at scale and very repeatable, that Globetrotters model makes a ton of sense. Team A, team B, team C one team can be playing in Savannah. One can be playing in Boston, one can be playing in Los Angeles, and you can play three shows in one night, right? Or one weekend. We felt like, again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but we felt like if someone comes to see the Savannah Bananas, we wanted to come see the only Savannah Bananas.

We want them to come see the main thing and to have those characters and those [00:08:00] players and those people that they see on social media or have heard about at the games to see them tonight. And so to do that, you can only play once. You can only be in one city at one time, one location, one game. And so we started to have to introduce new teams and the question became, okay, is it just gonna be the same show every night?

Is it just gonna be the same result? Well, then we began getting inspired by animation and storytelling. Pixar actually in general, because I think back to there was, they were describing the first Toy Story, right? When they were giving these toys, this world and this perspective, and this emotion and language, and the question was like, well, what does Mr.

Potatohead sound like and what’s his perspective on life and all these things? And it sounds dumb, but in the human mind you say. I connect with that. That’s real. He should feel like that. He should have some anxiety, he should have some ego and all these different things. And if you don’t have [00:09:00] that, the story breaks down and the realness breaks down and your brain can’t put that together.

And so we begin saying, okay, if someone comes to a Banana Ball game and they’re playing the party animals or tailgaters or the firefighters or whomever, they need to be able to make a real connection and say. I can’t believe I just saw that happen and I know it was real, and I know that there was failure potentially involved when one of our guys or girls goes out there and attempts a back flip catch, we want the audience to know that was real.

That person decided in their brain within half a second to see that ball, analyze the situation, get in place. Attempt the flip, maybe catch it, maybe not catch it, and hopefully that fan is wowed by the result or says, man, I hope they get it next time when I see them. Try that again. So that [00:10:00] realness also mixed with the show, mixed with competitiveness and mistakes.

That’s what we tried to continue to build over time.

Anne Ristau: So you’ve now been with the Savannah Bananas almost a decade or coming on a decade. When did it flip from you having to explain this is the concept and what we do to everyone sweating you for tickets? That’s, and I might wanna ask you for tickets at Fenway before we’re done.

Here’s Right. Because that was impossible to get last summer.

Jared Orton: So 2016, we sold out small stadium in Savannah, obviously 4,000, such some odd people. We sold out about 60 or 70% of the games, 17 out of the 25 games or something like that. And then 20 17, 20 18, 20 19 at our home stadium, we actually sold out all the games.

It was only 30 games though, and it was limited capacity, obviously, but we began realizing that this is the end. We’re in a league, we can only play so many [00:11:00] games. We really only have a fixed capacity here at the stadium, and so it’s not like we can just keep going up and up and up and adding more fans every single year.

We were gonna flatline. We were flatlining actually very quickly, very matter of fact. It was like there’s no upside in adding any more fans. And so 2021, we had began tinkering with this idea of, what originally was called a variety of names. It was not called Banana Ball originally, but what ultimately became what people know now as Banana Ball here in 22 and 23 and 24 going into 25.

We began testing that and began experimenting with what will it take for us to add truly new fans, reach new fans, and we go on a one city world tour. To Mobile, Alabama to Hank Aaron Stadium there in Mobile. Same story as [00:12:00] Savannah Stadium. Abandoned team left. Now we get to come in and bring a show and we do a one city world tour right after COVID 2021, and then we do a seven city world tour in 2022.

All the way from West Palm Beach, Florida to Kansas City, Kansas. Really massive world tour. And then 2022 to 2023 became really a flex point where we were still playing traditional baseball. We were doing this Banana Ball world tour thing and we had to make a decision, which way are we gonna go for our fans?

Is it just go back to the original thing, keep doing league games, or do we go all in on Banana Ball and 2023, we decided let’s go all in on Banana Ball, crank this thing, open 33 cities, half a million people. It was crazy. And I think that’s when people realize. [00:13:00] How do I really get to be a part of this?

And the waiting list got crazy and the lottery list got crazy. It was always demand, but it was small, it was regional, it was local, it was, oh, they play a few games in Savannah, no big deal. Now. It was like, wait, they’re going everywhere. How do I become a part of this? And, um, it’s become pretty large. What is your favorite Banana Ball

Anne Ristau: rule?

Jared Orton: I love fans catching a foul ball for an out. I think because you’re on the edge of your seat almost every time a ball goes over the net into play. And also because it’s probably, I would, I would say, I hate saying the best moment ever, but in Kannapolis North Carolina, two years ago, we had a kid down the left field line.

Catch a foul ball for the final out of the game and seal the win for the Bananas, and he’s like 11 [00:14:00] years old or whatever, and the whole team runs down there, grabs the kid from the front row, brings him onto the field, celebrating. He’s on the front page of the newspaper the next day, like this total heroic moment.

And it’s like, where else would you get that? In sports, right? Isn’t that just so cool? The fan finally gets to be a part of the thing and come together. So all the rules are fun, certainly in nature, but that fan catching a foul ball is just always a, a fun moment for everybody.

Anne Ristau: Speaking of your commitment to fans and your fan first initiatives, even as you’ve grown, the Savannah Bananas have been, um, very deliberate about keeping prices reasonable.

35 to $60. No ticket fees, no convenience fees or service fees, and you’ll even pay fans taxes. Talk about the secondary market, and it’s been challenging, and again, I know many people in Boston who would’ve loved to gone to Fenway [00:15:00] Park to see Banana Ball and couldn’t. How are you managing that?

Jared Orton: It is quite the conundrum for sure, and we’ve been very vocal about it and maybe too vocal sometimes.

What I’ll say is, I understand that if you can’t come to a game, I understand you need to offload your tickets somehow. Without a doubt. We don’t want people to be stuck with unused tickets. That’s, that doesn’t make any sense. We also want people to pay a fair price to get their hands on these things, and we cringe.

Almost crawl into a corner when we meet someone at a game and that story starts coming out. Couldn’t get the tickets, but paid $600 for every single one. And it was, and we’re like, oh my gosh, my real qualm, and this is a legitimate issue. I posted about this after our, our schedule got announced this past year, but in October.

When we announced our dates for the 2025 [00:16:00] campaign, 24 hours after we had announced the dates, just put the schedule out there. If you were to search Savannah Bananas tickets online, all the secondary sites, which are all generally reputable, but some are not reputable. All the secondary sites had tickets available.

Tickets, I’ll use air quotes for people listening to this. Air quotes, tickets available, and we had not sold a single ticket to anybody, but you could go on any of these sites and quote unquote buy a ticket with a section assigned to it, or standing room only, or berm or drink rail or whatever, at every single venue across the country.

And so what people see early on and right now. Is they see these speculative tickets, which are completely fake and have nothing to do with what we sell. Then they begin seeing these inflated prices and then they realize, oh my gosh, I can’t get my hands on these tickets, so I’ll buy ’em here [00:17:00] thinking they’re getting a real ticket.

But really someone is just putting a fake ticket out there to short the market. And what happens is, and I’ve seen this time and time again, someone comes to the gate all excited, smiling, wearing their banana shirts, and they go to scan and it scans red or something. Or they look at their phone, they say, wait, I thought I had a ticket, but I just got an email saying, my ticket’s been refunded, but I’m here.

How did that happen? And they come to us and they say, what am I supposed to do? And. We’re in a tough spot, and so we are working as hard as we probably ever have on trying to make sure that real tickets get to real fans and that they can trust what they buy. But we’ve gotta have participation from the other side to make sure that we don’t just let anybody and everybody get on the internet and say, look at me.

I’ve got Banana ticket.

Anne Ristau: An awesome endeavor for sure. And your commitment to getting fans. Real fans at [00:18:00] reasonable prices really has been impressive and unmistakable. Although social media has been obviously huge in your success, as you mentioned, but this year you did have five games of broadcast on TNT.

How did that deal come to fruition and does the banana ball experience translate?

Jared Orton: Yeah. Wow. Lots of good questions on that. So we had been committing to broadcasting early on YouTube, things like that. Very simple versions. Back in 2022, we had a small deal with ESPN to put some of our back half of the season.

We did a few fall games and put some games on ESPN plus and things like that. We had a documentary came out, things like that, and it was marginally successful and we just began continuing to tinker with it and tinker with it and tinker with it. And we got approached by ESPN again, and then all of a sudden some of the other networks came on board and Bally came on board [00:19:00] and it’s been kind of an evergreen test of how does Banana Ball translate as you question, how does Banana Ball translate from the live event experience to the broadcast experience?

I’ll give ’em credit. One of the things that we really pushed hard on going back to the fans first was, Hey, can we continue to serve this to our fans, commercial free on YouTube? No account necessary. Free to them, free to watch all that stuff while then giving the network the ability to obviously broadcast on their channels as they please, but still be able to monetize it and sell commercials and do both.

What we found was tons of people watched it on YouTube for free, and then the network had 114% increase on their viewership, and it was like, whoa. Everyone won The network got what they wanted. More content, more viewers able to pay the ad dollars. We got to be able to broadcast it for free and show all the fun things.

And [00:20:00] going into this next season, we’re putting an immense effort and investment into more talent and equipment and quality and the ability to hopefully bring this experience together into people’s homes, where if you’re only able to come once or twice to a game, maybe once a year, maybe twice a year, how can we still engage with you and bring you some fun and excitement on a monthly basis or nightly basis or weekend basis where you watch the game and say, okay, this is getting better and better.

So. We are nowhere close to where we want it to be, but we are on that journey of figuring out what it will take to really make that broadcast experience something that people are like, alright, appointment television tonight. Banana balls on.

Anne Ristau: Speaking of talent, how do you recruit and keep the culture consistent with all the various classes coming in and out of the team?

Jared Orton: We have to give [00:21:00] credit to the coaching staff, so Tyler Gillum, head coach, and, and Adam Virant, who’s really a guru of operations and pulling it all together, clear vision, all right, this is exactly what we have to do. They’ve believed in this thing for many years. Coach Gillum has believed in it. Gosh, for now, six, seven years.

Viro, coach Virant believed in it for almost five years now, and they are able to share this vision with these prospective players. Some of them have. Tons of professional talent. Some of them have played Major League Baseball before. We’ve got softball players. We’ve got guys who just graduated college.

We’ve got people with disabilities. We’ve got people who have played baseball, but maybe walk on stilts or something like that, and everywhere in between, and they bring ’em together and they explain. We are not just here to play a game. We’re here to, entertain people. [00:22:00] We’re here to take pictures with kids.

We’re here to dance. We’re here to challenge ourselves and do back flips. By the way, these pitchers are gonna throw 94 miles an hour, and we have to be prepared for that. And we’re gonna be really skilled, and we’re gonna take care of our bodies and we’re gonna take care of our minds, and we’re gonna be fan focused and we’re gonna be great on social media.

And it’s, the list goes on and on. But the culture of explaining to them, we want to have fun, we wanna make baseball fun, and we want you to show your personality and have fun yourself, and not take yourself too seriously, but really be skilled in three things. And that’s. Banana Ball skill, what we call fans first skill, which is how great are you with people off the field?

And then that social impact, which is, can you entertain, can you have fun? Can you show your personality? They really key in on those three things, and the ones who can pull off all three, as you can tell if you follow, like [00:23:00] they become superstars.

Anne Ristau: Talk a little bit also. Now on the business operations side.

Are you looking to grow your sponsorships portfolio in new media venues and things like merchandise?

Jared Orton: Sponsorship has been something that people have followed very closely. We really have abandoned for the most part. Mostly because we weren’t very good at it, uh, early on, and we were just doing it the same old, like every other minor league baseball team, just selling all the space known to man and realize, you know, that’s just not good for everybody.

We’re not the best at that. No one comes to our stadium to be smacked in the face with ads and commercials and things like that. And so who are we in business to serve? And that’s our fans. And so every decision that we make should be involved with how do we bring them a better Banana Ball experience?

And so we abandon the traditional advertising for a while. We have since gotten back into it after better [00:24:00] understanding. There are brands out there who actually can add to the fan experience with who they serve, why they’re doing it, what activations they can bring. One of the more recent ones is we’ve been working with Dunkin’ on a national scale to see people literally lining up to engage in the Dunkin’ activation.

Every city we go to and wear these ridiculous sunglasses and they got beach balls and sandy packs, all this, all this stuff. It’s truly something that brings a better experience to the game day for our fans, and our fans love it. They feel loved by Dunkin’ and, and the activations that go on there. We’ve got a great relationship with Wilson and Evo Shield.

Louisville Slugger, obviously on the product side, but then on the fan engagement side and some of the things that they’re bringing to the table for the future where it’s youth and kids and extremely creative, the gloves that they’re coming out with this year for our players is ridiculous. I’ve heard about water guns.

[00:25:00] I’ve heard about glow in the dark and lights and just ridiculous things, and we’ve got a few others that are gonna be added to the mix that again, our fans will feel the actual, tangible. Impact on it. On the merchandise side, merchandise is just what we do. We sell tickets and we feel like we sell merchandise and not just, let’s slap our logo on a bunch of crap, but are there real things that come from the show or come from the entertainment experience or player related or character related or IP related?

One of our favorite ones that we just came out with was. Our fourth brand, the Tailgaters. Jesse, as we were developing the brand was like, okay, they can’t wear baseball hats, right? Tailgaters aren’t baseball hat wearing people, they’re cowboy hat wearing people. And I was like, okay, I don’t know where we’re gonna find cowboy hats at an affordable price that players are gonna wear comfortably on the field, et cetera.

And the guy Corey, who’s in our [00:26:00] office, who runs our buying side for merchandise, sends me a link one night and is. I think I found it and he finds this company called Cowboy Snapback, and sure enough, they have the patent on snapback hats. Also have a cowboy brim on ’em. And I thought, oh my goodness. And so the team’s gonna be wearing trucker cowboy snapback hat this year, and that’s gonna be the merchandise on ’em.

And who knows if people are gonna like ’em or not, but we think it’s gonna be cool. And so we’re just trying to continue to be creative there, serve our fans better there. Extend those brands and extend those lines in a creative way that makes sense for people with the show elements, the character elements, the brand elements there.

And then the last piece of it is starting to build like our collectibles portfolio of game use things and autograph things. And our coach, Tyler Gillum, wears [00:27:00] cowboy boots, when he coaches, and so. Game worn cowboy boots from the coach, right? Like fans got their hands on those this year. So the merchandise is fun and then we’re certainly learning a lot about it.

Anne Ristau: Amazing. And I would say, I think your lens of making sure any brand partner enhances the fan experience is probably something that any sports property could take a lesson from. Alright, one more on brand extensions too. Tell me about this fan cruise.

Jared Orton: Okay, so our very first season when we had five employees or six employees, we surprised everybody with cruise and just a way to say thanks for working this year, and really easy to take six people on a cruise, but not very expensive.

Pretty easy to organize. We did it a couple years later and I think we’ve done two or three, and one time we were having a staff dinner celebrating the year or something like that, and one of our staff members had joked. We’ve done these staff cruises, but it’d be so cool if we could take our fans on a cruise one day.[00:28:00]

And you know, that moment when everyone just looks at each other, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. What if we actually did that? What would that look like? And people always ask us like, where do these ideas come from? Literally just like that. That’s how they come to life. And Emily began researching it and,

talking with the various cruise lines, and of course, what do you know? Brands can charter cruises and take their customers. Bands do this. Comedians do this. Chefs do this. Disney obviously had done it for years and then ended up just taking over an entire cruise ship industry and doing it themselves. And so we announced in 2020, I guess it was that we were gonna host Banana Land at Sea, the first ever Bananas Cruise, and we were gonna take 2,500 people on a cruise ship and did it with Norwegian and with help from one of their production partners.

And we were very [00:29:00] fearful that we’re pretty good at programming. A two hour Banana Ball game in a baseball stadium. But how are we going to program four days on the ocean in a team level cruise ship with theaters and bars and performance venues and stages and nightclub and karaoke and restaurants? And Emily and the partners who worked with us at Norwegian helped us

craft this amazing immersive experience with our players and our characters and our cast, and our band and our dance team, and all these different people came on board and people had a blast. I know that seems very self-serving and bias, but they had a blast. It was some of our diehard fans. I met fans who had been with us since day one, literally some of the first ever season ticket [00:30:00] holders.

Way back in 2016, we had them on the ship. We also met people from different countries who were like, I just heard about the Savannah Bananas six months ago, and my first time is coming on a cruise ship with you guys. And so it was like we had those spectrums and everywhere in between and we had a blast.

And hopefully we’ll do it again and keep plussing it and it’ll be a lot of fun.

Anne Ristau: All right. So where do you go from here in terms of the schedule for 2025 is very big. Yep. Is there more tours, more cities international on the roadmap?

Jared Orton: Yep. So firefighters and tailgaters are third and fourth team. They will begin hosting their own banana ball games this upcoming season at various sites later on in the summer and fall.

So that’s gonna be a big test for us. Can those new brands, experiences stand on their own without the Bananas. What [00:31:00] is that brand ethos going to be? Because that’s the only way we can grow the game of Banana Ball. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s not gonna be Bananas playing 300 games or being in three different cities at one time.

It’s gonna be on the backs of these new brands, and so we then announced in 2026. We’ll be forming an official league with two more teams here in 2025. We’re gonna be having a championship series at the end of the season. It’ll be real, but it’ll also be a little bit of a test, a beta test for lead play championship season and things like that in 2026.

On the international side, we don’t know. We really don’t know. We feel like Banana Ball’s got a long way to go in North America. We’ve only played in front of a million people, and so we hope to play in front of 2 million people here in 2025. There’s 300, whatever, 350 million [00:32:00] people in the United States, and we’ve only played in front of 2 million of ’em, so we fly.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, if you will.

Anne Ristau: I’d love to wrap up with some rapid fires. First question, what did you wanna be when you grew up?

Jared Orton: I wanna be third baseman for the Atlanta Braves Chipper Jones was my Atlanta brave hero. Has he

Anne Ristau: been to

Jared Orton: a banana ball game? I doubt it. I well, I, well, you never know, but I doubt Not that I know of.

Yeah. I

Anne Ristau: think Chipper

Jared Orton: needs

Anne Ristau: to get out. Favorite stop on the tour?

Jared Orton: Oh goodness. I always loved our first one in Mobile. Uh, always stands out. I loved playing at Rick Wood Field in Birmingham, the old Rick Wood field. So cool. And then certainly Boston was a fun one and in Cooperstown a couple years ago. It’s really cool.

Anne Ristau: Dream venue that you would love to play but haven’t yet?

Jared Orton: Oh goodness. Speaking of the Braves would’ve been cool to play at the old Turner Field. It’s been transformed now or, or changed. Would’ve been cool to play at the old [00:33:00] Yankee Stadium. We’re gonna be the new one, which would be fun. I will say people always talk about playing at Field of Dreams.

Which would be a fun one. We also have talked about, this is not really dream venue, but we’ve toyed with the idea of what if we just showed up somewhere, like someone’s high school field and just told people like, we’re here, come see us. What would that be like?

Anne Ristau: Love it, like a flash mob, but better renewable.

Do you often get proposals at games and was Jesse’s proposal to Emily’s the first?

Jared Orton: I think his was the first, and yes, we do. Very lot of pressure with those. We sometimes will say yes, but we also tell people like, are you sure you want us to be the ones in control of this experience? We see it all. What we do know and we tell our staff is, Hey, we are here for people’s celebrations and anniversaries and [00:34:00] birthdays and first games, and.

Family reunions and sometimes we’re also there for like people’s sad moments. We met so many fans who were like, they had someone pass away and maybe this is the first time that they’ve come back to an event or something like that. And so we’re certainly very cognizant of we are more, it’s more than just a baseball game, more than just an animal game.

This is something that hopefully people will remember.

Anne Ristau: Who is a dream recruit for you or dream fan to have out a gate? Oh

Jared Orton: gosh. Okay. Dream fan. I gotta go Matthew McConaughey. I’d love to have him. The Minister of Culture as I believe he refers to himself. All right. And how about Dream Recruit? Oh goodness.

Dream recruit. I think right now we have our site set on Shohei Ohtani.

Anne Ristau: Wow. I love

Jared Orton: it. We’re gonna be very close to him. At a spring training site. I believe that phrase so close was so far away. I think you’ll be so far away at that point.

Anne Ristau: You [00:35:00] never know. Jared, thank you so much for joining us on navigating Sports Business and for, for providing insights into the incredible, wacky and fun world of the Savannah Bananas.

Jared Orton: Absolutely. Great questions, great conversation. Thanks a lot for this.

Anne Ristau: If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to us. Although if you want tickets, sign up for the lottery and don’t get scammed by the third parties. My email is ANNE@NVGT,com and you can also connect with us on my personal LinkedIn or the Navigate page.

Again, this is Anne Ristau with Navigate joined by Jared Orton. Thank you for joining us and please stay well.