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The Savannah Bananas have transformed into an absolute sensation after successfully establishing themselves as the baseball equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters. Fans who attend their games will get to see players pull off a variety of stunts on the field, but one member who tried to nail a backflip on CNN ended up treating viewers to one of the hardest faceplants you’ll ever see.
It’s been close to a decade since the Savannah Bananas played their inaugural season as a member of the Coastal Plain League (a collegiate summer circuit in the Southeastern United States) before capping things off with a championship in their first year of existence. That victory didn’t exactly thrust the team into the national spotlight, but they managed to end up there with a new approach to baseball that the franchise embraced a couple of years later.
2018 marked the first year the team began experimenting with the unique set of “Banana Ball” rules that served as the catalyst for its meteoric rise by literally changing the game with tweaks like the institution of a two-hour time limit for all contests, a ban on bunts, and the opportunity to allow fans to record an out if they can catch a foul ball.
The “Banana Ball” games quickly morphed into over-the-top spectacles featuring stunts that were specifically engineered to go viral with the help of players who routinely break out into choreographed dances on the diamond and pull out some wildly theatrical walk-ups and home run celebrations.
The Bananas have embarked on multiple nationwide tours while routinely drawing massive crowds to the stadiums where they host their games;80,000 people packed into Clemson’s Memorial Stadium to do their thing in April earlier this year, and another 70,000 were in attendance at the venue that’s home to the Tennessee Titans.
They’ve also attracted a laughable amount of backlash from pearl-clutching Baseball Purists who have been less than thrilled with the manner in which a team with a banana for a mascot has bastardized their sacred game, and I have a feeling they’ll derive some schadenfreude from what unfolded when a player stopped by CNN on Thursday.
Savannah Bananas player RobertAnthony Cruz absolutely ate it after attempting a backflip on live television.
The Bananas can credit a good chunk of their success to the masterclass its marketing and public relations teams have conducted while orchestrating their triumphant rise.
On Thursday, the franchise got its latest boost courtesy of CNN, and RobertAnthony Cruz—a former Washington Nationals prospect who played second base at Biola University—was invited to appear in the studio for a segment where he tried to pull off one of the backflips he routinely nails on the field with ease.
Unfortunately, things did not go as smoothly on the set, as his face violently collided with the floor after he failed to stick the landing.
This Savannah Bananas baseball performer face plants a backflip on CNN live. pic.twitter.com/Sw65apsr8x
— Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) July 24, 2025
Thankfully, Cruz was able to joke about what transpired in an Instagram post where he said “I’m all good” while noting the incident spawned “some stitches, slightly damaged pride, and some unparalleled dad lore.”