The Savannah Bananas are taking Banana Ball beyond the United States for the first time. Their 2027 Banana Ball Championship League tour will include the league’s first international stops, with games in Monterrey, Tijuana, Toronto and Winnipeg, as the schedule grows to 79 stadiums across 74 cities.
That is why the tour reveal matters now. Fans searching for Notre Dame are landing on the one date already fixed on the calendar there: Banana Ball 360 will debut at Notre Dame Stadium on June 26, with two baseball fields set up on opposite ends of the stadium for a format built to keep the action moving in both directions. Jesse Cole said on ESPN2 that the league had heard from different countries all over the world, and he said he expects the 2027 tour to draw an estimated 4.3 million fans.
The international dates come early and late in the season. The Bananas will play the Texas Tailgaters in Monterrey on Feb. 5 and 6, then the Party Animals will take on the Loco Beach Coconuts in Tijuana on Feb. 12 and 13. Later, the Bananas will play the Indiananapolis Clowns in Toronto on Aug. 14 and 15, and the Tailgaters will face the Party Animals in Winnipeg on Aug. 26 and 28. The tour also includes stops at Dodger Stadium on April 23 and 24 and at Angel Stadium on July 2 and 3, where the same teams will play for the third consecutive year.
Cole has spent years talking about growth in the language of experiments and ambition, but the criticism followed the team as its earlier tours stretched across only one city and then seven cities in the southeast. He now says the league has always had a vision to create 1 billion fans, one fan at a time, and that the experiment has gone places he never imagined. The new schedule answers one obvious complaint with dates, stadiums and passports: this is no longer a roadshow inside one country.
What comes next is another test of scale. Banana Ball 360 arrives at Notre Dame Stadium on June 26, and a new Disney-produced film documenting the sport’s rise is set to premiere June 12 at Truist Park. By the time the league’s third cruise, Bananaland at Sea + Puerto Rico, departs in January 2028, the Bananas will be trying to prove that their biggest sell is no longer novelty. It is reach.
