Former Cubs Pitcher Ryan Kellogg Wasn't Sure About the Savannah Bananas

Ryan Kellogg does not strike me as the obvious guy to put in a tutu.

He is 6-foot-6.

He pitched at Arizona State.

He played professionally in the Chicago Cubs organization.

He represented Canada internationally.

He started college studying mechanical engineering and still describes himself as a science-and-math guy.

And when Kellogg first heard about Banana Ball, he wasn't exactly running toward it.

“I was definitely feeling it out,” Kellogg told me.

That is probably putting it mildly.

Kellogg was playing independent baseball in 2022 alongside Dalton Cornett, now with the Firefighters. Cornett started telling his teammates about this strange baseball thing he was going to do.

There would be dancing.

Singing.

Music.

A tour.

Kellogg remembers the reaction from a clubhouse filled with traditional professional baseball players.

“What is that?”

Pretty understandable.

Kellogg had spent his entire baseball life being taught almost the opposite.

He was a serious pitcher.

Don't show emotion.

Give up a hit?

Next pitch.

Give up a home run?

Next pitch.

Do your job.

Then his own baseball plans changed.

A job he expected to have fell through. Kellogg and his wife were vacationing in Mexico when he started asking around somewhere else to pitch.

Mexico.

Overseas.

Anywhere that would allow him to continue his career.

A friend gave him another possibility.

The Savannah Bananas needed an arm.

Kellogg knew just enough about Banana Ball to be unsure about it.

Then he discovered Connor Higgins was there. Higgins had also attended Arizona State, and the two had trained together in Arizona.

Kellogg called him.

Higgins told him he'd had an absolute blast.

That helped.

Kellogg eventually signed.

But I love this part of the story:

Even after signing, he still wasn't entirely convinced this would become his baseball future.

That changed quickly.

Welcome to Banana Land

Kellogg drove roughly 14 or 15 hours to Oklahoma City to join the team.

Then came the green tutu.

“They hand me a green tutu,” Kellogg remembers.

He asked the logical question.

What's this for?

“Third inning, we're doing toddlerography.”

Kellogg's response may be my favorite quote from my entire chat with him:

“That's not a word.”

It didn't matter.

A three-year-old was going onto the field. Whatever she did, Kellogg and two other players were supposed to imitate.

This is worth remembering:

Kellogg says he had never danced before in his life.

Now he was about to do it in front of roughly 12,000 people.

“There’s 12,000 people here. I have never danced before in my life. And now I’m doing toddlerography out here.”

Welcome to Banana Ball, Ryan.

From mechanical engineering to Napoleon Dynamite

The transformation didn't stop there.

Kellogg had once dressed as Napoleon Dynamite in college.

Jesse Cole learned about it and asked whether Kellogg knew the famous dance.

Nope.

Apparently that was the wrong answer.

“You're going to do the dance,” Kellogg remembers Cole telling him.

So Kellogg practiced.

Not for a few minutes backstage.

For weeks.

Eventually, during a game in Milwaukee, he had to pitch through six innings knowing that when the inning ended he would take off his yellow jersey, reveal a Vote for Pedro shirt and perform the Napoleon Dynamite dance.

Think about the mental gymnastics involved here.

First, get through six innings.

Second, don't get shelled.

Third, hope the sixth inning doesn't go terribly because performing a comedy dance immediately after giving up four runs would be a rather difficult transition.

It worked.

A teammate ended the inning with a backflip.

The music started.

Kellogg took off the jersey.

The Party Animals sat down to watch.

And the quiet Canadian pitcher performed the entire dance in front of thousands of people.

“Longest two minutes of my life,” he told me.

The scientist meets Banana Ball

This is what makes Kellogg particularly interesting to me.

Banana Ball didn't take an entertainer and teach him baseball.

It took a baseball player who thinks analytically and taught him to become an entertainer without stopping being a baseball player.

Kellogg described his old personality as “scientific, analytical, logical.”

Then he said something that pretty much sums up the whole transformation:

“None of this is.”

He's right.

But apparently that's part of why it worked.

Kellogg told me that pitching was one place where he'd always been comfortable being the center of attention.

He'd thrown countless bullpens and innings.

Put a baseball in his hand and put him on a mound and he knew exactly who he was.

Dancing in front of thousands of people was different.

“That was not just stepping outside my comfort zone,” Kellogg said. “That was jumping out of my comfort zone.”

Today he's the Savannah Bananas pitching coach.

Which means the guy who once had to figure out how to make that jump himself is now helping another generation of pitchers figure it out.

There's something wonderfully Banana Ball about that.

The traditional left-handed pitcher who wasn't sure what he'd gotten himself into didn't merely stay.

He became one of the people teaching everybody else how to do it.

And it all started with a green tutu.

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