When Jesse Cole was 10 years old, he visited the National Baseball Hall of Fame with his dad and dreamed about playing for the Boston Red Sox, where he’d put together a career that would earn him enshrinement in the Hall.

Last weekend, he finally got that Hall of Fame moment -- just in a way he never expected.

Cole and the Savannah Bananas concluded their 87-game, 33-city “World Tour” with a visit to Cooperstown, N.Y., to celebrate the Hall’s new exhibit on the wildest team in baseball.

The exhibit features Bananas items ranging from a kilt worn by a player in a game to the original paper that Cole used to write down the rules for the “Banana Ball” version of the game that the Bananas play.

“It was called ‘Show Ball’ back then,” said Cole, the Bananas’ owner.

A quick primer for the uninitiated: The Savannah Bananas are a traveling team that plays against the Party Animals, another team constructed by Cole, and other local professional teams -- or even former Major Leaguers. They used to be a part of the Coastal Plains League, a summer circuit for college players, along with playing against the Party Animals in games that had “Banana Ball” rules. In 2023, they left the CPL to focus fully on their tour, which is all Banana Ball, all the time.

What is Banana Ball, you ask? Well, it’s the same baseball you know and love, just with some twists. All games are limited to two hours. There are no mound visits. If a fan catches a ball, it’s an out.

“Everything started with an idea,” Cole said. “As far back as 2018, I was just writing ideas down every single day and kept dreaming of a faster, more exciting and more entertaining game.”

Not long after Josh Rawitch took over as president of the Hall in September 2021, he began having conversations with those around him about including the Bananas in the Hall of Fame in some way. Those conversations accelerated last August when he reached out to Cole, which led to the two of them working together to tie the unveiling of the exhibit around the end of the yet-to-be-announced tour.

“I think it’s important for the Hall to continue to be relevant for the next generation of fans, and we’ve seen the Bananas are doing their part to be relevant,” Rawitch said. “We’ve done exhibits on Field of Dreams and The Simpsons; finding things in pop culture that help tell the story of baseball [is] important to the museum’s mission. It was an easy decision.”

And somehow, after a tour that filled ballparks across the country, the finale at Doubleday Field in Cooperstown met the moment. With the Bananas and Party Animals having each won 33 games on the tour, the finale would decide the winner. While the Bananas have naturally drawn some similarities to the Harlem Globetrotters, the Party Animals are not the Washington Generals; they play to win. After eight hard-fought innings, the Party Animals took home the victory in the final inning.

“Most fans are rooting for the Bananas to win, so whenever they lose people are like, ‘Did that just happen?’’’ Cole said.

Rawitch was one of the 6,500 fans in the stands for the matchup, which gave him an up-close and personal view of what the Bananas mean to baseball fans.

“That crowd was unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” Rawitch said. “That game was a bit of an evolution for Cooperstown. They talk a lot about being a fan-first team, and that’s an important part of what we do at the Hall. We want people to leave here with an experience that they’ll talk about for years.”

Those fans have come out in bunches. Cole says that more than half a million fans attended the Bananas’ tour, with a waiting list that passed one million people.

“We haven’t even come close to hitting the demand,” he said. “We have some work to do to take care of the fans.”

In 2024, Cole says the Bananas will move to bigger stadiums, with an eye on international exhibitions starting in '25. But until then, fans will be able to satiate their desire for Banana Ball at the Hall’s exhibit. Backflips not included.

“It’s something memorable that people will be talking about for a long time,” Rawitch said.