A greater purpose

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, September 17th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Faith and fame.

You might know the Savannah Bananas for their outrageous stunts—we covered that side of the story last week. But this week, we’re considering what happens when baseball’s biggest entertainers start asking if all the fun and fame are enough. For some Bananas teammates, the answer took them down an unexpected path.

MAST: What began as quiet conversations among teammates soon turned into something much bigger—something they couldn’t keep to themselves.

AUDIO: [Sound from outside the stadium, Hey! Go Bananas!]

It’s a common sight outside Historic Grayson Stadium in Savannah, Georgia: a mass of people waiting for an encounter with the wildly popular Savannah Bananas. The team’s league plays a version of baseball they call Bananaball. It’s built for excitement.

ANNOUNCER: That ball is annihilated! RobertAnthony Cruz, walk off home run!!!

The players are both professional athletes and entertainers.

ANNOUNCER: You are watching Bananaball live on ESPN. The greatest show in sports takes over Fenway for a second straight year…

As a result, the league has sold out major league stadiums two summers in a row. Owner Jesse Cole is famous in marketing circles for leveraging stunts to attract attention. Whatever is normal, he says do the opposite. Here he is on the ACQ2 podcast talking about some things he tried out with a previous team.

JESSE COLE, OWNER: I just said, let’s get crazy. We started doing grandma beauty pageants, dig to China night where we actually buried a certificate to China in the infield dirt, and after the game we had everyone dig to China.

HOST: Like an actual trip to China?

COLE: Yeah, but it was just a one-way flight to China.

We offered George Bush after his term was over an internship with us. We're going to have a host family, a stipend.

So we just started doing everything to create attention.”

Similar stunts with the Bananas worked too. The league attracts millions of fans… so many, it’s hard to even get a ticket to a game. But the Christian players in the league—like Catcher Bill LeRoy—were finding that the fame was empty.

LEROY: If that's what we're constantly looking for is the next high, is the next, the next fun thing to do, or the next? If that's all we're chasing in life, we're doomed, that stuff gets old no matter what you do.

He wasn’t alone. Other players in the league also wanted something deeper.

MEADOWS: Three years ago, I was looking for things in the wrong places, whether it was going out and drinking every night, partying like a rock star…

Outfielder D.R. Meadows:

MEADOWS: And that wasn't, that wasn't how I wanted to live. That wasn’t me. The Lord has worked in my life more than I could have imagined.

So, the players looked for a way to pursue their faith together. That turned into a Bible study. They started with a handful of players, but within months, 40 of the league’s roughly 100 players started coming.

As the studies grew, they began considering something new. What if they opened it up to even more people—including fans.

Bananas outfielder RobertAnthony Cruz:

CRUZ: We started praying, okay, like God, if you want us to, let us know, if you want us to take this outside of what we already have.

But going public raised new questions. Would worship nights look like just another Bananaball marketing spectacle?

CRUZ: We don't want it to be performative. We don't want it to seem insincere when we are sharing our faith.

And they do worry about what might be motivating the fans coming to these events—maybe they’re just coming for an autograph.

BRIDGES: It makes us want to shut stuff down...

Player Noah Bridges says the only way around that is to hope that maybe the fans would hear something that would change them.

BRIDGES: So if they're coming here with a different heart posture, we pray that God, you take care of it, we're just here for one reason, that's just to exemplify you. You take care of the rest.

Catcher Bill Leroy agrees. He says they can only worry about their own motivations, despite what it may look like from the outside:

LEROY: We started this just because we needed the gospel, like, it's, like it's we're and we're sharing this 100% like, we don't want your money. We want something that's just like, it's so good to us at our core that we want other people to have the same thing.

And he says that’s helped clarify his mission and insists it’s no stunt.

LEROY: My job here is not to play ball. My job is to spread the Gospel, like with the gift of all of this, all of this that I'm doing is a gift from God.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.