Riyan Rodriguez pitched for a year on the baseball team at Missouri State, where he earned a master’s in three semesters and planned for medical school.
Then he became a Party Animal — a sibling club of the Savannah Bananas — which is an independent barnstorming team based in Georgia that plays by its own rules. The Party Animals are meant to be the foils to the lovable Bananas — except the outcomes of the baseball games are unscripted and the Party Animals win games.
The Party Animals closed out the 2023 Banana Ball World Tour with nine consecutive victories.
The basics of Banana Ball
“I really like that if the fan catches a ball, it's an out,” Rodriguez said. “I think that's really fun.”
After drawing a walk, a batter sprints to first base and heads for second as defenders converge on the middle infield. All nine defenders must touch the ball before attempting to tag the batter.
Pitcher Rodriguez just gets out of the way.
“You're guaranteed first base no matter what; obviously, you walked,” Rodriguez said. “But some of the faster guys can get to second base on every single walk. It's almost an auto double.”
Banana Ball games only last two hours, and teams earn points for winning innings. In the final inning, each run is a point toward the final score. If the game is tied after two hours, fans are treated to a showdown:
A pitcher, a catcher, and one fielder. The batter has to score.
No ghost runners.
As a righty reliever, Rodriguez may get a chance to shut down the Bananas in a showdown. But don’t expect him to hit.
“Yeah, yeah, I cannot swing a baseball bat,” he said. “I can throw a ball. That's about it.”
Bananas and a show
Rodriguez doesn’t just throw the ball for the Party Animals. The Bananas brass encourages players to “celebrate everything.” The team has nearly 8 million followers on TikTok, and players dance and sing before games and between innings on every stop of the tour.
“I'll jump into the splits or I'll do something silly after a good strike,” Rodriguez said.
He’ll get back to baseball before you can say “lickety-split.” Pitchers throw every 4-6 seconds, he said.
Real fun, real baseball
The Party Animals are not like Washington Generals, the basketball team that exists as a punching bag for the Harlem Globetrotters.
“That’s like running joke around here. We’re not like the Globetrotters,” Rodriguez said. “You open up the Bananas' TikTok and it's just people dancing and singing, having fun. Some people think, ‘Oh, these guys are just shirtless, dancing.’ No, we're playing hard-nosed baseball, and we're trying to win.”
However, the players do play it up. The Party Animals are the “bad boys.” Some players come up with characters. Rodriguez is “Sexi Mexi” — complete with cleats on his cowboy boots.
Now the organization has a third club: the Firefighters. They’re like split squads, if you will. The teams play each other at Grayson Stadium in Savannah, but they’ll also be traveling the U.S. in the spring, summer and fall of 2024, playing at minor league stadiums — and six big-league ballparks, beginning with Minute Maid Park in Houston in March.
Tickets are hard to come by, but you can join the wait list. The tour stops by Oklahoma City in May.
“We sold out Minute Maid in a matter of minutes,” Rodriguez said.
It will be a far cry from the relaxing atmosphere of Hammons Field, where it’s usually so quiet you can hear the cleats hit the dirt. Rodriguez can’t wait to see Miami and play in Boston.
“It’s gonna be sold out, which doesn't even click in my head,” Rodriguez said. “I'm gonna be playing in Fenway. It doesn't make sense.”
The season ends in mid-October with a cruise to the Bahamas for fans and players.
How do you become a Party Animal?
You play six innings in high school.
At least, that’s how Rodriguez did it — not that he’d recommend it. Back at Valencia High in Santa Clarita, California, he was a late bloomer.
“I was a junior on the JV team, and all my buddies were up on varsity. I only threw 81, 82 (mph). I’ll be honest: I sucked.”
But he wanted to play, so after high school graduation, he caught on at an NAIA school in Santa Barbara called Westmont.
He didn’t actually play. He redshirted, then transferred to Los Angeles Mission Junior College.
“The one I went to takes everybody,” he deadpanned.
Rodriguez sustained a back fracture and herniated disc from pitching.
“Doctors are like, ‘Hey, dude, like, you should probably stop playing ball,’” Rodriguez said.
Instead, he spent six months at Driveline, a baseball development center near Seattle, in 2019. He gained throwing velocity, and he shared videos throwing in the low 90s on the social media platform X (then Twitter), which Driveline retweeted.
“I got probably 40 or 50 calls from schools across the nation,” Rodriguez said.
He joined the Arkansas Tech University Wonder Boys, but he was awed when he heard about the Savannah Bananas.
The players danced between innings. They flipped bats.
“I was like, ‘I would do anything to play for that team,’” Rodriguez said.
After a couple of seasons at Arkansas Tech, where Rodriguez completed a bachelor's degree in biology, he transferred to Missouri State as a graduate student and pitched for the Bears in 2022.
Pitching and singing at Missouri State
Missouri State baseball coach Keith Guttin will retire after this season, his 42nd as head coach of the Bears. A serious competitor, Guttin is not someone you’d expect to mesh with the playful Rodriguez.
“Why would you say that?” Guttin quipped.
“I kind of loosened (Guttin) up a little bit,” Rodriguez said. “He let me try out a lot of stuff he probably shouldn't have.”
“I probably didn’t know about it,” Guttin said.
But the coach respected that Rodriguez could settle down.
“He's an entertainer, that's for sure,” Guttin said. “But he's all business when he's on the mound.”
Rodriguez made 28 appearances as a reliever in 2022, going 4-0 with a 4.31 ERA and holding opponents to a .218 batting average.
Rodriguez also sang the national anthem on Senior Day at Hammons Field.
“He can sing, I mean, that's proven,” Guttin said. “We had never really had a player that we felt like would do the song justice. I thought it was cool, and he loved it, and I think everybody involved enjoyed it.”
How to get to BananaLand
Rodriguez spent three semesters at Missouri State, completing a master’s in natural and applied sciences, and he was accepted into medical school.
Then the Bananas reached out.
“I don't know if I wanted to drop out of med school to go and join this strange team,” Rodriguez said.
He waited so long that the roster filled. The Bananas' marketing department offered him a job as a gameday host, but instead he pitched for the Rockies of Grand Junction, Colorado, an independent minor league team. They’re now called the Jackalopes.
“I was like, ‘Hey, let me go play a season of pro ball. I need to see what it's like,'” Rodriguez said.
After the 2022 summer season, he reconnected with the Bananas staff, who asked him to attend a tryout in Long Beach.
How to stand out?
This is a team with a pitcher, Dakota Albritton, who stands 10 feet tall — because he wears stilts on the mound. In one game, Zak Whalin strode to the plate with bat aflame, thanks to a kerosene bath. He hit a hot shot up the middle, naturally.
For his tryout, Rodriguez wore “a little disco shirt thing” and breathed fire. In other words, he put cornstarch in his mouth, warmed up, then lit a piece of paper on fire. He blew on it.
“In my head, I was like, ‘This is gonna look sick. It’s like you breathe fire.’ But it was the middle of the day in Long Beach. You couldn't see any flames.”
Coughing, Rodriguez realized:
“Oh, I have to pitch the entire inning with cornstarch just cementing in my mouth. It was rough, but they liked it, I guess.”
He was selected and signed by the Party Animals.
Making baseball fun again
The Bananas were initially a summer collegiate baseball club, and players lived with host families in order to maintain NCAA eligibility. Now, they’re on year-round contracts. Rodriguez shares a house with two Party Animals (literally).
“This is the best organization,” he said. “We're on a yearlong contract, so it’s really nice to know — even when we're not working — we're gonna be okay.”
The team owners, Jesse and Emily Cole, also run a non-profit that celebrates foster families. Naturally, it’s called Bananas Foster.
Rodriguez says the teams spend an hour after every game signing baseballs and chatting with fans.
“When you meet a 5-year-old kid, you’re a superhero to him,” Rodriguez said. “Being able to sign their ball and seeing their faces light up is the coolest thing.”
Rodriguez made a positive impression, according to the Bananas broadcast entertainer Biko Skalla.
“Riyan Rodriguez might just bring more excitement and juice to the Banana Ball field than anyone else in the sport, which is absurd to say, especially for a rookie,” Skalla said.
A Party Animal from the very start
In his first-ever appearance as a Party Animal, Rodriguez wore tight black baseball pants, a white tank top and baseball cleats: one white, and one pink. His hair was cut into a mullet, and he rocked a mustache. After singing to the crowd, Rodriguez pitched well, clocking a strikeout and ending the inning by stabbing a line drive hit up the middle. He pumped his fist, beat his chest, and did the splits.
“There is a genuineness to Riyan's exuberance on the field that is impossible to fake,” Skalla said. “When he lost his mind at the end of his Banana Ball debut, he truly blacked out.”
Rodriguez wants kids to have fun playing sports.
“I think I understand why so many people are getting bored with normal baseball,” he said.
He mentioned his young cousins, who prefer playing the Fortnite video game to playing ball outside.
“If you lose, you just start another game in two seconds. In baseball, if you strike out three times in the game, it sucks,” he said. “It doesn't feel good.”
Rodriguez, on the other hand, feels great about playing ball and entertaining the sold-out crowds in Savannah and beyond.
“I really do believe in Banana Ball because it keeps kids having fun enjoying the game,” he said. “You can be yourself — and that’s not how ‘old baseball' is.”
