SAVANNAH, Ga.— What started in 2015 as a college summer baseball team selling just a handful of tickets in its opening months has evolved into the phenomenon known as the “Savannah Bananas,” selling out every single game since we adopted the moniker in 2016.
This year marked the Savannah Bananas’ biggest broadcast season yet. In June, we brought “Banana Ball” to ABC for the first time, taking on the Party Animals at Autzen Stadium in Eugene, Ore., and our new Banana Ball Championship League is bringing more fans into more packed stadiums than ever.
Our exclusive distribution deal with Disney+ and ESPN—the most ambitious in Banana Ball history—allows for every game to be streamed on the ESPN App and Disney+, with select games airing across ESPN networks and ABC. True to our “Fans First” ethos, every broadcast remains free to watch on YouTube regardless of where else it airs.
REMI Banana Ball
With our audience growing at pace, BTV (Banana Ball TV, our production arm), has needed to rapidly build up its technical capabilities. We’ve seen a lot of growth for the 2026 World Tour season, so we’ve rebuilt our facilities over the past two years to increase our efficiency and output. Prior to this latest expansion, we were operating with consoles not designed for broadcast production, which caused a number of challenges.
Working closely with Sean McCluskey, our head of engineering, we designed and implemented a REMI workflow that gives our production staff consistency without compromise as they move from room to room and site to site. Spread across two main control rooms at our remote facility in Savannah, and with flypacks positioned out in the field, we’ve placed Calrec’s audio network at the core of our REMI operation, building in the capacity our rapidly expanding operation demands.
We adopted an agile, distributed system, installing three 36-fader Argo M consoles, three Type R systems, and True Control 2.0. This gives us a combination of analog, embedded SDI, MADI and Dante. All of our audio gets a first-pass mix and level set before it’s embedded in our video transmission back to Savannah. We make sure lip sync is correct on-site, so when everything reaches our control rooms, we can focus on mixing the broadcast as if we were at our home stadium.
The Calrec Assist GUI gives us full remote console control, keeping our operation agile whatever the demands. Using a browser means we can access any console from inside the stadium to make changes, and I can also work remotely from home to support our shows and fix issues quickly. It’s a genuine game-changer.
Range of Venues
That agility matters because no two venues where we play are the same. We love massive stadiums, but we also love the smallest ones equally. We recently played at Kyle Field in College Station, Texas, one of the largest venues in the state with a seating capacity of more than 100,000; two days prior, we played at a high school with free admission and a maximum capacity of 1,000. We are here to deliver a consistent entertainment experience.
That range of venues also demands an adaptable approach, which is why we work with local audio operators rather than carrying a full crew with us. Many of these engineers come from an entertainment and film background rather than broadcast, but the Calrec consoles have made it extremely easy for them to make that transition and excel.
Banana Ball is as much about performance as it is sport. It’s designed for casual fans who love great entertainment as much as for die-hard sports fans who want a legitimate season to follow, and creating that fun, positive environment is what resonates with people.
With our Championship League in its inaugural season and our television and streaming output expanding, Calrec’s Argo consoles have dramatically improved our production, putting us in the best position to broadcast the next chapter of one of sport’s most extraordinary success stories.
More information is available on Calrec Audio’s website.
