Few brands have been more successful at attracting and holding an audience’s attention in recent years than Banana Ball. As the popular upstart baseball league’s 2026 season gets underway, its on-field creativity and fan-first mentality hold valuable lessons for other organizations trying to stand out in a crowded marketplace. But Banana Ball’s handling of one recent story holds just as many lessons about the value of restraint and discipline in communicating through a crisis.
Banana Ball’s crisis started in September 2025 when the sports and culture website Defector raised questions about the league’s nonprofit, Bananas Foster. The charity’s mission celebrates the foster care community while educating and inspiring others to get involved. Defector suggested a nonprofit like Bananas Foster “might be credibly accused of self-dealing,” noting that in 2024 it reported spending more than $52,000—almost 80% of its programmatic expenditures—on game tickets and merchandise for guests.
Financial misconduct would represent a major crisis for a brand that built a significant part of its identity around affordability and financial transparency. Any high-profile company would be tempted to hyperventilate over stories insinuating it had taken advantage of its customers to enrich itself. The stakes are especially high for a brand so committed to putting fans first that it built its own ticketing platform to keep prices low and circumvent resellers.
An entity as visible as Banana Ball might be expected to address a controversy like this with an aggressive, attention-getting strategy. But in this case, leaders exhibited uncharacteristic serenity. Their discipline in engaging with and responding to criticism shortened the proverbial storm, contained its impact and kept the league focused on its fans. Here are three things communications leaders can learn from how Banana Ball managed its crisis.
Take it seriously and engage substantively.
Under-responding is one of the most common mistakes in crisis communications. It can be tempting to simply ignore uncomfortable questions or try to paper over them with a generic statement. In today’s fast-moving, social-media-driven news cycles, under-responding risks missing the best chance for audiences to hear your side of the story and losing control of the narrative.
Rather than stonewalling, Bananas Foster engaged. Executive Director Jolie Chabala and volunteer CFO Sarah Trumler gave Defector detailed program descriptions, cost estimates per family served, and important context on program expenses, including clarifying that “no donor dollars were paid to the Savannah Bananas.” Chabal and Trumler conceded that Bananas Foster was “new,” that they were “still learning,” and that its IRS filings needed amendment. They even went so far as to share that a national accounting firm was revising the return.
The organization demonstrated appreciation for good-faith concerns and an understanding of what happened, couched in transparency and sincerity rather than evasiveness or defensiveness. Its response demonstrated the combination of humility and decisive action that donors and regulators expect when a nascent organization stumbles on compliance. Their posture helped shift the tone of the story from outright scandal to “young, underdeveloped nonprofit.”
Maintain Channel Discipline
The temptation to get ahead of a negative story can lead to the other most common mistake seen in crisis communications: over-responding. While engagement is critical, over-responding risks turning a minor reputational blip into a full-blown brand crisis by shifting more focus to the negative story and injecting information and opinion that fuel the fire.
Threading the needle between under-responding and over-responding is the hardest part of communicating through a crisis, and it’s where Banana Ball really shone. By engaging with Defector but not issuing a public statement, leaders ensured Defector readers heard the league’s side of the story without bothering the millions more fans who don’t read the site.
Stay On-Mission in Public Storytelling
Discipline allowed the Bananas to stay on-mission with their public storytelling and continue building awareness and trust with the growing fanbase. Even around the time of the Defector article, other news coverage and the league’s own digital content emphasized their celebration of foster families at games. Continuing to highlight beneficiaries and the human side of Bananas Foster helped keep the brand associated with joy and generosity despite the accounting questions.
As a result, there has been no discernable effect on Banana Ball’s reputation in the months since the Defector article ran. To the contrary, the league has expanded from four teams to six, grown its broadcast footprint, welcomed a reported 4.2 million fans to its ticket lottery, and sold out the first half of an expanded 2026 schedule that includes stops in two of the six largest sports venues in the country.
It all goes to show that when a crisis breaks, restraint should rule the day.
Nathan Burchfiel is a Senior Vice President at Pinkston.