Banana Ball Picks Its 2027 Map Tonight: The Savannah Bananas Reveal Their World Tour Cities Live From Grayson Stadium

Most baseball teams announce a schedule with a press release and a graphic. The Savannah Bananas built a whole show around theirs — and tonight, that show is the main event. The 2027 Banana Ball City Selection Show takes over Historic Grayson Stadium in Savannah this evening, where the Bananas will reveal, city by city and stadium by stadium, where the Banana Ball World Tour is going next year. In a sport that usually treats its calendar like paperwork, Banana Ball treats it like a draft night, a concert and a lottery drawing rolled into one.

According to Sports Illustrated, the festivities at Grayson Stadium begin well before the announcements: the plaza opens at 4:30 p.m. Eastern, gates open at 5 p.m., and the show itself starts at 6 p.m. Eastern. Fans who cannot be in Savannah can watch the full schedule and the rest of the night's Banana Ball news on ESPN2 and the Banana Ball YouTube channel, a broadcast plan owner Jesse Cole announced ahead of the event. When a barnstorming baseball act gets its own televised selection show, the selection show is not really about logistics anymore. It is a statement about how big this thing has gotten.

Two Hundred Cities Raised Their Hands

The demand behind tonight's reveal is the real story. According to the Savannah Morning News, the Bananas spent months fielding interest from cities and venues across the United States and beyond, and earlier this year Cole said the organization had heard from more than 200 cities across every state, along with 10 countries, including Canada and Mexico. The North Jersey newsroom, part of the USA Today Network, reported that the team was weighing roughly 75 locations for the 2027 tour before tonight's final list is read out.

Sit with those numbers for a second. Two hundred cities did not politely inquire about a novelty act. They competed for one. Mayors, stadium operators and tourism boards have figured out what Bananas fans have known for years: a Banana Ball weekend is an economic event, a traveling festival that fills hotels, restaurants and — most unusually for baseball — the seats, every single night, with people who bought their tickets through a lottery because demand outruns supply. The Bananas have already taken the show into some of the biggest rooms in American sports, including a stop at Yankee Stadium, and tonight's teases suggest the ceiling is still rising.

What the Team Is Teasing for 2027

The Bananas have said the 2027 announcement could include new destinations at MLB and NFL stadiums, iconic venues and, in the Savannah Morning News's telling, unexpected places where fans might not expect to see Banana Ball at all. That last category is the most Bananas detail in the whole rollout. This is an organization whose entire brand is doing the thing traditional baseball would never do, in the place traditional baseball would never try it, and then filming the crowd losing its mind.

There is also a competitive layer to watch this year, because Banana Ball is quietly becoming a league and not just a tour. Sports Illustrated's coverage of the recently completed first Banana Bowl — the championship night that closed the 2026 season — raised the question of whether fans who arrived for the dancing and the trick plays are starting to follow teams and standings for real. Tonight's city reveal will draw in the casuals. What the organization does with its traveling teams, a real championship and a growing map will decide whether Banana Ball's second act is a bigger tour or an actual sporting institution. The presence of a Bananas exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, pictured above, suggests the institution part is already under way.

Why This Works, According to the People Running It

The philosophy has never been complicated, and the Bananas have never pretended otherwise. Team president Jared Orton summed the whole enterprise up for Sports Illustrated in a line that doubles as the organization's mission statement: make baseball fun, make it about the people, make it about the fans. Everything about tonight's production flows from that sentence. A normal schedule release serves the media. A selection show — with gates, a plaza, entertainment and surprises promised by the organization, according to Sports Illustrated — serves the people in the building and the people watching at home, and it turns a list of dates into a night fans actually remember.

The timing helps, too. Tonight's show lands in the middle of a crowded sports evening — Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, with the Brewers one win from the pennant, and Thursday Night Football in Denver. You can follow both right here, in our NLCS Game 4 preview and our Seahawks-Broncos preview. That Banana Ball can hold its own slot on a night like this, on ESPN2, against the baseball postseason it once parodied, tells you the joke has fully reversed: the parody is now programming.

How to Watch, and What to Write Down

The City Selection Show starts at 6 p.m. Eastern (3 p.m. Pacific) tonight from Historic Grayson Stadium, which is celebrating its 100th year in 2026, and airs on ESPN2 and the Banana Ball YouTube channel. If your city gets called, the work starts immediately: note the venue, the dates and which Banana Ball teams are coming, because those three details determine everything from ticket-lottery strategy to travel plans. As Sports Illustrated advised its readers, a city announcement is exciting, but knowing exactly what to do after your city gets called is what turns excitement into an actual seat.

By the end of the night, Banana Ball will have a 2027 map drawn from a pool of more than 200 hopefuls, and a few dozen cities will start planning the loudest weekend of their sporting year. Everyone else gets to do what Bananas fans do best in the offseason: argue about the map, lobby for next year, and wait for the lottery. More from our sports desk lives on the sports front, and the day's full run of headlines is on the news front.