Banana Ball is coming to Canada, and Toronto gets it first. The Savannah Bananas will take on the Indianapolis Clowns at Rogers Centre on August 14 and 15, 2027. They will be the first Banana Ball games ever played in Canada.
The dates were revealed Thursday night on ESPN2 as part of a 2027 schedule covering 79 stadiums in 74 cities. It’s the first season the touring show has left the United States. Toronto opens a two-city Canada Series that wraps up in Winnipeg later that month.
The impact goes beyond the ballpark. A summer weekend of family crowds in the downtown core will be felt by the patios, food counters and shops around the stadium. For anyone hoping to go, getting a ticket means entering a lottery that works nothing like a typical Toronto on-sale.
Canada has been on the organization’s wish list for years. Back in 2023, founder Jesse Cole told the Savannah Morning News that interested Canadian cities had been left off that year’s tour. Requests kept coming from fans and venues alike.
In an interview with ESPN, Cole pointed to the steady stream of interest from outside the United States.
“We said the time is now,” he says.
Mexico gets the first international games, in Monterrey on February 5 and 6 and in Tijuana a week later. Toronto follows in August, then Winnipeg’s Princess Auto Stadium on August 26 and 28. Four of the league’s six teams will make the trip.
“This was 10 years in the making,” Cole told the Associated Press.
The rest of the 2027 calendar leans on baseball’s best-known landmarks. Teams will play in Cooperstown in late May, where the Hall of Fame is opening an exhibit on all six clubs, and at the Field of Dreams movie site in Iowa in September. The Loco Beach Coconuts are booked into a 4,000-seat stadium in Honolulu.
The Banana Ball Open returns to ESPN Wide World of Sports at Walt Disney World in April. Notre Dame Stadium will debut Banana Ball 360, with two diamonds set in opposite corners and teams switching fields every inning.
All told, the season includes 204 shows, 23 major league parks and 10 football stadiums. Cole projects roughly 4.3 million fans. Rogers Centre is one of five MLB parks hosting for the first time. After 2027, Citi Field in New York will be the only big league stadium that hasn’t hosted a Banana Ball game.
For the uninitiated, Banana Ball is baseball with the slow parts removed. Games end at two hours. A fan who catches a foul ball records an out. Hitters can steal first, and teams play for points rather than runs. Between pitches, players dance, backflip and occasionally show up on stilts.
That format is a big reason the stands fill with families. A two-hour game fits a kid’s attention span, and you don’t need to know what a sacrifice fly is to enjoy it. Not many events at Rogers Centre can say that.
Downtown should feel it well before first pitch. At past MLB stops, tens of thousands of fans arrived hours early for the pregame party, turning a ball game into an all-day outing. Expect busy patios along Front Street, lineups at quick service spots around Union Station, and steady traffic through CityPlace and the waterfront.
Many Banana Ball fans also travel, planning weekends around tour stops the way people follow a favourite band. Some of those trips will mean hotel nights in the core.
Nobody will confuse it with the Olympics. Still, a year after Toronto hosted FIFA World Cup matches, it’s another international event with the downtown skyline in the shot. It also fits where live sport is heading in the city: toward events sold as much on the experience as on the score.
Getting in takes some luck. Banana Ball skips the general on-sale entirely, so there’s no queue to wait in and no 10 a.m. scramble. Every ticket goes through a random draw on the Fans First Tickets platform.
Fans enter on the Banana Ball website and pick one city per entry. Signing up early doesn’t help, since winners are drawn after the list closes. Those selected get an email with a set window to buy, plus a verification step meant to keep bots and scalpers out.
Organizers warn that tickets from third-party sites won’t be honoured at the gate, and that most ticket offers on social media are scams. Members of the K Club, Banana Ball’s priority program, get early access. Some MLB hosts have also run presales for their own members, though the Blue Jays haven’t announced one.
The 2027 lottery is open now. It closes October 31.
Dustin Fuhs is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of 6ix Retail, Toronto’s premier source for retail and hospitality industry news. As the former Editor-in-Chief of Retail Insider, Canada’s most-read retail trade publication, Dustin brings over two decades of expertise spanning retail, marketing, entertainment and hospitality sectors. His experience includes roles with industry giants such as The Walt Disney Company, The Hockey Hall of Fame, The Canadian Opera Company, Starbucks Canada and Blockbuster.
Recognized as a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert in 2024, 2025 and 2026, Dustin delivers insider perspectives on Toronto’s evolving retail landscape, from emerging brands to established players reshaping the city’s commercial districts.