Chicago’s own Savannah Banana-style exhibition baseball teams are rolling out

To find goofier, happier humans having more fun you’d probably need to go watch kids at an open fire hydrant in August.

And that’s the whole point for the Chicago Snowballs — the city’s newest co-ed baseball team that will offer up a brand of ball made popular by the Savannah Bananas baseball team in recent years. Think baseball’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters.

The Bananas are at the center of the six-team touring Banana League, and they offer a variety of exhibition baseball known as Banana Ball. It has become a bona fide phenomenon, filling the country’s biggest stadiums (including Rate Field last summer) with family friendly two-hour games featuring hurlers on stilts, flaming bats, backflipping catches, singing, dancing and the occasional crawling-baby race between innings.

The Snowballs, which have no affiliation with the Banana League, take the field for their first game in front of paying customers on May 2 at Kerry Wood Cubs Field in Roscoe Village.

Tickets go on sale April 1 and will run $15 for kids 12 and under and $30 for everyone else, said Snowballs CEO Cherie Travis. She likens the team, which has no home field at the moment, to a traveling circus, with about 10 games a month scheduled through September at ballparks largely in the Chicago area but around the Midwest, too.

Travis got the idea to form the team after watching a television interview last year with Savannah Bananas owner Jesse Cole. She remembers thinking: “What a great way to spread joy in this world.” Travis, an attorney, real estate investor, adjunct professor at the DePaul College of Law and instructor at the Chicago Police Academy, is learning on the job with an undeniable excitement and energy for her new role.

“I definitely feel a bit like a mother hen, without a doubt,” said Travis, who personally called each player to let them know they’d made the team. Players are paid base compensation, plus additional earnings for each appearance, according to Travis.

Things are moving at warp speed. With only six weeks to go before their first game, the to-do list includes filling the roster for the team the Snowballs will play.

The opposing team was named earlier this week: The Rocket Squirrels, the crafty, sneaky, mischievous prankster little brother counterpart to the jolly Snowballs. Tryouts, or, “auditions” as they’re being called for the Rocket Squirrels, will be held March 27.

‘My motto is YOLO’

There was no stern-faced coach walking around Snowballs practice late Thursday evening at the Dome in Rosemont, telling players to stop messing around because their first game is right around the corner.

Quite the opposite.

“Everything that coaches have been telling them their whole lives: ‘Don’t mess around. Don’t be a show off.’ We told them we are encouraging that. That is what we want to see,” said Snowballs Project Manager Kristen Adamiak. “As soon as we gave them that freedom they were instantly like, ‘OK. Let’s go.’”

Spend about 30 seconds on the team's social media accounts, or any of the accounts of the players (several consider themselves content creators), to get a bead on their vibe. Two of their latest posts feature players riding their bats like horses and one dressed like a Frenchman using a baguette as a bat.

In addition to baseball coaches, the team has a tumbling coach and a dance choreographer.

About 100 people showed up for tryouts in February, with 28 making the team.

Most of the players — ranging in age from 19 to 46 — played ball in high school and college. A few have minor-league experience. And those without the high-caliber pedigree bring other skills to the table.

There’s plenty of talent to go around.

Laila Summers, 23, is the lead singer of a Taylor Swift cover band called Fearless and pitched for the Providence Catholic High School and St. Xavier University softball teams.

“Hopefully I can sing while walking up to the mound, or at bat, maybe with guys dancing behind me, or do the national anthem,” she said.

“I hope to have a signature trick, where people go, ‘Oh, that’s the Laila,’” she said, noting she can do the splits.

“My motto is YOLO,” said Summers, of Orland Park, who will incorporate her underhand pitching alongside other pitchers who throw traditional overhand. “Why not go perform and play the sport you love and meet incredible people and get the chance to show young girls you really can do anything.”

“The women on the team — there’s four of us right now — we’re just jumping into it with these guys. They’re all helping us out, but we're holding our own,” she said, noting that the team instantly jelled like nothing she’s experienced.

“I never felt like I had to warm up to these people and slowly become myself. It feels like we’ve been friends for so long,” she said, adding that a team text chain is buzzing all day with ideas for new tricks and ways to entertain.

At her first practice, she spontaneously sang a duet of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” with teammate Rick Petricca.

Petricca is a 32-year-old IT manager who can solve a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute, play piano, and consistently whip snowballs against a tree in his neighbor’s backyard in Arlington Heights (a video he shared with team management ahead of his audition).

At a recent practice, as teammates worked on behind-the-back catches and between the leg throws, Petricca, who’s expecting his first child in April, said he’s perfecting drop kicking the ball to first base.

“You can’t really explain what we have here, you kind of have to come and see, and then you feel it,” he said.

“Right before I left home I was talking to my wife and I said, ‘There is no place, other than being with you, babe, that I’d rather be.’ This is the most fun I’m having. It’s literally a dream come true,” said Petricca, who played club baseball at Indiana University.

Rayquon Minor, 26, is one of two active Jesse White Tumblers on the team. “Becoming a tumbler was all I wanted to do as a kid,” said Minor, who grew up near the Cabrini Green housing projects before his mother moved his family to Highland Park, where he attended high school.

“I love the Snowballs because I love entertaining and making people happy and, especially with all the hate in this world, spreading light,” said Minor, who has his own clothing brand and played Chicago Park District baseball growing up.

Teammates say KJ Gaiter, 26, has a natural charisma. He also says this.

“I bring the swag and the dance moves. The people say I dance like Usher. I don’t say that at all. But the people say it,” he says, a slight smile curling the corners of his mouth.

Gaiter played ball at Westinghouse College Prep, lives in Lincoln Park, coaches youth baseball and is one of several players inclined to spontaneously taking off his shirt.

He’s also building up an acting resume. He’s had non-speaking roles on “Chicago P.D.” and is working on getting speaking roles.

All team practices open with an hour of dancing.

Paul Stancato, whose official title is co-director of entertainment, calls out dance instructions on a microphone as he performs the maneuvers himself.

“MC Hammer shuffle, MC Hammer …. Good!” he says as he performs the signature maneuver of the ’90s pop star, transitioning into a lasso-throwing turn.

Stancato has performed as a Blue Man in Blue Man Group, worked as an aerialist with Cirque du Soleil, and choreographed and directed Broadway shows. “My job is to make sure the audience is entertained from the minute they open the gates to the last catch or hit of the game,” he said. “And I tell ya, attitude is everything, and with this group sky’s the limit.”

“We have people who have rhythm and people who struggle with rhythm. But I can work with them, mold something, because we want audience members to get in on the fun and start dancing with us. And we’re building specific routines that are easy to digest but still build off their personalities and show what they can do,” he said.

Stancato emphasized the group’s camaraderie as an intangible asset.

When a team practice was cancelled due to severe weather in early March, the team text chain blew up with disappointment about not being able to get together, with one player positing a next-best solution: “Wait, can we have a sleepover?”