Havertown’s Mike Tollin hopes to make the Savannah Bananas the next Ted Lasso

Mike Tollin has spent enough time in Hollywood to know how difficult the next steps can be as he tries to turn the Savannah Bananas into the baseball version of Ted Lasso.

The Havertown native signed a deal for the scripted TV rights of the Bananas, the wildly popular baseball team which brings its Harlem Globetrotter-esque show to Citizens Bank Park on Saturday, and has secured a production studio. Next, he needs to hire a writer and find a distributor that is willing to film a pilot or even commit to an entire first season about how a wacky baseball team built a ticket waiting list of more than 3 million people.

» READ MORE: Who are the Savannah Bananas? Here’s what to know before they play at Citizens Bank Park on Saturday.

One thing Tollin won’t have to find is characters. The Bananas have plenty of them.

“We have an entire cast,” said Jesse Cole, who founded the team in 2016 with his wife Emily and acts as a ringleader during each game while wearing a yellow tuxedo and top hat. “A male cheerleading team to a senior-citizen dance team to break dancing coaches to twerking umpires to Princess Potassium to me and Emily. There’s so many people involved in putting on the show that it would do quite well on TV.”

Cole reached out a few years ago to Tollin, who was only slightly familiar with the Bananas. The team — which plays baseball under its own rule with a game called “Banana Ball” — sold out big-league ballparks across the country this year and has a waiting list for their games in Georgia.

Cole told Tollin he received interest in turning his venture into a TV show but he thought Tollin was the right guy.

Tollin produced Radio and Coach Carter, directed Summer Catch and Arliss, and was the executive producer for The Last Dance, the 10-part documentary about Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls. He saw enough in his visit to Savannah to think the Bananas can be his next win.

“I was surprised and flattered,” Tollin said. “It’s a great, great story. Unbelievable human interest. [Cole] truly had a vision and he is a true showman,” Tollin said. “There’s a big word: indefatigable. But if you look that up in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Jesse in his yellow costume because he is just tireless and keeps going and going.”

The Bananas were a collegiate summer league team until 2022, when Cole decided to go all-in on Banana Ball. Their games have a two-hour time limit and Cole eliminated all the “boring” parts of a baseball game like mound visits and walks. A foul ball caught in the stands is an out, the batters routinely dance to home plate, and one pitcher wears stilts on the mound. The players are high-caliber players — most played college ball — but the games are as much about the show than the baseball. It’s entertainment created by a guy who credits Walt Disney and P.T. Barnum as two of his biggest influences.

“We only sold a handful of tickets when we first started,” Cole said. “I was hung up on numerous times and thrown out of meetings and not embraced like we are now. We had this big, crazy vision and I think a lot of people didn’t understand it because we hadn’t shown it yet. Once they started coming to games in Savannah and saw what we were doing, they said ‘OK. Wow. I get it. This is different.’ Then we had a bigger vision and said we’re going to create a new sport. That’s the wildest thing. Yes, the Bananas and the dancing and the fun. But creating this sport of Banana Ball was one of the biggest risks we took … To see a wait-list approaching 3 million people is unbelievable.”

» READ MORE: Philly native Ivan Traczuk grew up at the Vet, beat cancer, and now helps the Savannah Bananas go viral

Tollin plans to spend the first season of the show with the Bananas’ origin story after Cole moved to Savannah in 2015 with his wife, Emily, and leased the town’s historic ballpark. The Coles sold their house, slept on an air mattress, emptied their bank accounts, and did whatever it took to make the Bananas work.

“It was one of the hardest things we ever had to go through,” Cole said. “But I’m also so grateful because it added an appreciation for how far we’ve come since then. Since the beginning days of film and books, people root for the underdog. They want to find people they can root for and people they can relate with. I think everyday people have challenges and adversity that they’re trying to overcome. To an extent, we were able to overcome a pretty big one.”

The Bananas are a baseball team, but Tollin thinks the show will resonate with much more than baseball fans, which Tollin said is the key for it to succeed. Ted Lasso isn’t just for soccer fans and The Last Dance wasn’t just for hoops junkies.

“The secret is that it has to be way more broad base than baseball fans,” Tollin said. “That’s the secret to Banana Ball. You don’t have to love baseball to love Banana Ball. That’s what we hope for the series. Banana Ball is a great mix of baseball and entertainment. There’s never a dull moment. You never know what to expect.”

» READ MORE: Meet the Savannah Bananas before they take over Citizens Bank Park

Tollin will be at Citizens Bank Park on Saturday to see the Bananas. He marveled during his visit to Savannah about the team’s extra-inning rule — which features a pitcher, catcher, and one fielder vs. a batter — and loved watching former Phillies closer Jonathan Papelbon pitch in a kilt. Saturday night should be just as wild. The team has surprises planned and hijinx ready. The characters will be there. And perhaps soon, they could be TV stars.

“It’s no secret that the business is contracted, budgets are tight, and profit margins are slim,” Tollin said. “But you can’t look at it that way. We fall in love with something, expect to get our heads banged around a little bit, and just keep going. There are people who love this because of how broad the appeal of the Bananas are. We’re going to ride the wave of their popularity in the world and propel this thing. The show will be very, very different, but I think people will be attracted to it.”