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Banana Ball by Jesse Cole & Don Yaeger

Just watch the documentary. 🍌⚾️

This would've been much better if half the book wasn't just Jesse Cole writing his autobiography. This is probably to be expected though, part of me feels like this is due to the fact that Banana Ball is still very new and doesn't have a lot of history. So that would-be history of the game gets filled in with the history of the creator.

Interestingly, in a sort of reverse book adaptation scenario, the ESPN documentary series actually provides more insight into Banana Ball than this book does. 🎥👍 Unusual because it's typically the book that has more content that the show/movie. Now I know the two are completely unrelated, but there's next to nothing in this book that the documentary didn't already dive further into. I think the only piece of new info that's mentioned is the team's decision to leave the Coastal Plain League and focus on Banana Ball full-time. Which is great because Banana Ball is awesome, but I think the book's mention of this is mostly just a side effect of it being newer, and coming out after this decision was made.

To me the best part was at the very beginning in the author's forward, before even getting to the meat of the book. As part of the writing process, the co-author attended every Banana Ball game of 2022. 🗓️ He talks about how social media simply doesn’t do the real thing justice. How being at a live game is even zanier, wilder, more unpredictable, and more pure fun than anything he's ever seen on any field. 😵‍💫 And when he took his son to one of the games, his son looked at him and said, “Dad, please don’t take me to a regular baseball game ever again.” 🚫⚾️