Going Bananas

[captainsblog]

This is not the post I was looking for, though it was going to begin with the same title, and with these two graphics.

Not these bananas-



(a produce code so ubiquitous and memorable that even I know it when I do self-checkout, unless I hit 4031 by accident and somehow buy four ounces of watermelon....)


Or this Bananas-



("Sally Bananas," a totally early-70s comic I remember running in Newsday that lasted only a few months, by longtime New Yorker cartoonist  Charles Barsotti).*

It was GOING to be these Bananas, who have come up with a revolutionary new idea for modernizing the game of baseball even beyond the 2023 rule changes in the majors and likely heading there from the minors.



I'll get to THEM in a second.

No, the main passenger of the driving bananas this morning is ME, as the Surely and Safely-ended Story of the ATM That Ate My Money Order is, apparently, not yet over.

This saga began on the 14th of June, the day before my second quarterly income tax payments were due on June 15th.  It helped immeasurably at the time that the client in question had just paid just enough to get those payments out on time. Until an evil ATM decided to eat their two postal money orders and not credit my account for them. One of them was credited within a day or so, but the saga of the larger one continues to haunt me, several of them already chronicled here.

There were visits to the bank. There were provisional credits added and subtracted and then added again. Then, in July, there was a  visit to the post office. I paid 17 bucks to trace the money order I never got credit for. I got a snailmail letter from the post office saying, yup, looks like that money order was never cashed, give it ten more days and we'll issue a replacement. I did, and it was, and I deposited it, telling my friend at the branch they could now take their provisional credit back. Then, a day later, the bank finally got done with their investigation: yup, looks like we should've credited you for that money order we ate, the provisional credit we gave you is now permanent.

So now I'm ahead by the amount of the evil money order. Being a good citizen, I reported this to Mary, who promised to be sure it's cleared up. She called last week to tell me, well, things are slow, it could take a month to reverse a permanent credit.

No problem. Even though I SEE the extra moolah in my online balance, I've already backed it out of the check register, figuring they'd get around to reversing it again.

Today, it was gone. But. Here's how the reversal looked the first time they took it away from me:

08/01/2023

REVERSE PROVSL CREDIT-DISPUTED TRANS 06/12/23

And THIS is what this morning's entry looks like:

09/15/2023

DEPOSITED ITEM RETURNED

They're the same amount, the one on the evil money order. And I have not deposited any other check in the same amount in the past 30 days, which is normally way long enough for a bank to bounce a deposited check. I cannot see the source of the "item" online. That will arrive via snail mail, if I'm lucky, next week. I suspect, though, that the Post Office changed ITS mind about paying on the replacement for the original damn money order, and now it's Another Fucking Trip to the bank to make sure that they don't also reverse the credit and leave me short the amount that's been fucking me over for three months now.

Oh, and the significance of three months? I had to, and did, send out another quarterly round of estimated tax payments just yesterday, on the 15th. So funds are tight right now, and I can't just rebuild the cushion without leaving something else unpaid somewhere.

Steven Wright once told a joke about putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room and letting them fight it out.  I feel like I'm the room.

----

Anyway: yes, we have some baseball bananas.  I came upon this story from a friend who works at the Baseball Hall of Fame. He previewed a new exhibit that just opened yesterday in Cooperstown, dedicated to a low-minor independent team that has somehow turned the rules of the game upside down and done it with an amazing amount of, dare I say it, a peel.

Minor league teams have shorter seasons, few if any playoff or all-star contests, and star players are slow to develop and quickly promoted or traded when they do show promise. So the key becomes, as Spaceballs made clear, "the moichandising!"  You need a goofy name, like the Muckdogs or Rumble Ponies. Bobblehead giveaways and weird unrelated things like Brooklyn's Seinfeld Night become your big ticket draws.  What happened in Savannah, though, took the whole carnival atmosphere a whole bunch beyond that: completely changing the dynamics of the on-field game itself, much from the warped mind of team owner Jesse Cole:

The Bananas were founded in 2016 as a member of Coastal Plains League, a summer circuit for college players. But Cole always had grander ambitions, eventually starting a professional team alongside the amateur squad so he could fully try out a version of the game he calls "Banana Ball."

Among the rules: a two-hour time limit on games, no bunting, batters having the option of trying to steal first, no stepping out of the box, no mound visits, and a scoring system that awards a point to the team that puts up the most runs each inning.

But beyond the rules, Cole delivers a barrage of entertainment on almost every pitch, including choreographed dances, bizarre skits and players roaming through the stands mingling with fans.

Those between-inning things are even infecting the majors, with KissCams and mascot races and the like.  It's the rule changes that make this the best variation on the game since the introduction of the designated hitter.

I'm kidding. These are better.  Here are some others, not mentioned above:

Under real rules, any foul ball that isn't caught by an on-field player is just a foul ball. Fans have fun, but only fun, trying to catch them, but in Banana Ball, if a fan in the stands catches a foul ball, the batter is out.  That no doubt leads to some interesting interactions in the stands when it's a home player who hits the foul ball.

These are not your father's walks. On Ball Four, the batter takes off, but he better damn run. The catcher immediately puts the ball in play to a fielder. The other eight defenders must each touch the ball before the walker (who, hence, better be damn running) touches 'em all and steps on home plate. "Take your base" becomes a race.

And you know the joke about tie-breaking soccer shootouts being the equivalent of replacing baseball extra innings with a home run derby? They went Bananas on that, too:

When a game is tied at the two-hour mark, there will be a showdown tiebreaker. If a hitter scores in a showdown, it's worth one point. However, if they get out, there are no points. There are three possible rounds to the showdown but if at any point a homerun is hit over the outfield wall, it's a walkoff win and the game is over. Round one includes a pitcher, catcher and one fielder vs. one hitter. Round two includes pitcher and catcher vs. one hitter. And round three includes pitcher, catcher and one fielder vs. one hitter with the bases loaded. If the tie has not been broken in round three, the game will continue until one team has won.

Now would you like to learn about the blue lines in hockey?

Cole has gotten out of the real game and turned his pro Calvinball players into a barnstorming troupe like the Harlem Globetrotters. Their perpetual Washington Generals opponents are called the Party Animals.  Their home stadium has a ridiculous waiting list, and the demo game in Cooperstown sold out faster than a Taylor Swift concert.

Laugh all you want, but admit it: two years ago, nobody had heard of some stupid thing called "pickleball," but now it's taken over tennis and even handball courts all over the country, much to the dismay of their previous occupants.

Maybe the Mets should just give up their NL franchise to Montreal and go into this next year. With only two championships in 62 years, how much worse could they do?

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* "Sally Bananas" wasn't the only weird Thing on the Newsday comics pages I grew up reading, preferring those far more to the smarminess of Family Circus and such.  In fact, there briefly was a Thing literally called that:



Larry Gore wrote for MAD and, somehow, got these daily insertions of bizareness into a Long Island daily newspaper around 1968.  No wonder I turned out so strange.