Even though Elizabeth Milstead, 41, fought and won a two-year battle with breast cancer, she felt guilty.

Her 9-year-old son, Jack, loves baseball. Not just loves, he is obsessed with it. A baseball rug sits on the floor of Jack’s room, and each time the Orioles play he listens to the radio broadcast and moves figurines around the basepath, reenacting every play with precision.

Elizabeth, a seventh- and eighth-grade teacher at Arbutus Middle School, doesn’t like baseball. Not in the way Jack does. So his travel baseball desires got washed away between the normal chaos of parenting an elementary school kid and the countless rounds of chemotherapy.

Elizabeth wanted this year to be different, however. She had less stress and more time, so the Milsteads dove headfirst into all things baseball. Jack made the Howard County Youth Program All-Star team, and when a friend told her about the Savannah Bananas, she jumped at the chance to get tickets.

“Honestly, that’s what I’m looking forward to: going and having fun with something that my son also loves,” Elizabeth said.

The Savannah Bananas, a team that markets itself as “the fastest and most entertaining game of baseball,” will play two games at Camden Yards, one each on Friday and Saturday, as part of a national tour of MLB, NFL and local stadiums.

The team appeals to all age groups, but one group that’s particularly drawn to the Bananas: parents who don’t like baseball or have family who don’t like the sport.

In Elizabeth’s case, there’s a lightheartedness about the team that professional baseball lacks. Major League Baseball, with players being paid millions of dollars by billionaires looking to profit off their investment, is a business. The Bananas, however, don’t take themselves too seriously.

“They’re very silly. They dance and they sing and they play good baseball, as far as I could tell. They hit the ball; they throw,” Elizabeth said. “They’re good baseball players, but they also have fun with it. And I think sometimes, with my son and his baseball team, when things get really stressful, and like you’re worried about winning and throwing strikes and hitting and like all of this stuff, my motto is always, ‘Baseball is fun. It is a game.’”

The Savannah Bananas videos Jack watches illustrate his mom’s point. While a highlight reel for an MLB game might include a great catch or a home run, Bananas clips show backflips and through-the-legs throws.

Jack, who has been promised a trip to the Bananas merchandise store, can’t wait to see what the team is like in person (his favorite part is when fans catch foul balls, because they count as outs in Banana Ball). Meanwhile, other parents are trying to get their young children into baseball through the games.

Will Cox, from Halethorpe, bought tickets, hoping this would persuade his 5-year-old daughter, Riley, to like baseball.

There’s a reason the Bananas sell, according to Cara Peters, a marketing professor at Winthrop University. The Bananas experience is meticulously crafted from start to finish. It’s controlled chaos meant to mimic the feeling of a circus coming to town.

Attendants in inflatable penguin suits escort fans to the stadium. Players hand out roses to girls under 10 and record TikTok videos with the crowd between innings. The CEO of the company wears a banana-yellow suit with a matching top hat and asks fans for ideas to improve the experience.

Banana Ball also revolves around nine rule changes that, she said, make the game “faster, more engaging.”

1. If fans catch a foul ball, it counts as an out
2. If a pitcher throws a wild pitch, the batter can steal first
3. If a batter steps out of the batter’s box, it counts as a strike
4. If a batter bunts, he is ejected from the game
5. No mound visits
6. Walks don’t exist. Instead, on ball four, the batter begins running around the bases in what is known as a sprint. The ball must then be touched by every fielder before the runner can be tagged out
7. Each inning is winnable. Whichever team wins the inning gets a point toward its total
8. No inning can start after one hour and 50 minutes into the game
9. If a game is tied after nine innings or two hours of game play, a tiebreaker happens involving a pitcher, batter and one fielder

Laura Sitler, like Elizabeth Milstead, isn’t the biggest fan of baseball, but her 12-year-old son adores it. So the Bananas were a good compromise for the Crownsville resident.

“The Savannah Bananas came out with something that just sounds really entertaining, really family focused. I love that the ticket prices were very reasonable,” she said.

The Bananas price tickets from $35 to $125, making the prospect of taking the family much more palatable than going to a Ravens game, she said. To keep ticket prices low — and those tickets away from resellers — the team uses a complicated lottery process that did frustrate some fans.

“I would say it would be great in the future if we didn’t have to go through so many different iterations of emails like, ‘OK, yes, we’re almost here,’” Sitler said.“‘You have to do this now. OK, yes, you’re getting closer, but we still don’t know that we can guarantee the ticket.’”

Curtis Sproul, an assistant professor of management at Georgia Southern, warned that getting Bananas tickets on reselling platforms can be risky.

As a Bananas enthusiast, he’s watched as tickets in Boston and Baltimore have been listed across StubHub and other platforms for four times the amount the seat normally would retail for (in recent weeks the get-in price for the games in Baltimore has been as much as $200, but it is now below $50 on some sites).

BMore Around Town owner Brian Snyder sells suite experiences to local events and listed 65 tickets to each game at $295 a piece (or $550 for both games). All tickets, according to his site, sold.

“It’s a show; it’s an experience. It’s a show; it’s interactive,” Snyder said. “You know, I think one of the things as a local sports fan, one of the fun parts of it is that you don’t have skin in the game, so to speak, where you’re not emotionally caught up in a specific team winning. You’re there just to take in the experience, and they do such a great job with that.”

The easiest preview for fans eager to participate in the newest craze was the Bananas’ trip to Washington at the end of June. The team sold out Nationals Park for a series against the Firefighters, another team in the greater Savannah Bananas Universe (the SBU, if you will).

The SBU contains the Party Animals, the Firefighters and the Texas Tailgaters. Where the Harlem Globetrotters have one main opponent, and the games often feel staged, the Bananas are different, perhaps because of their origin story.

The team originated in the Coastal Plain League, a collegiate summer league, and maintains a high level of play because of it.

For most viewers, there isn’t a stark difference in play between minor league baseball and the Bananas.

Whether it’s keeping up with the latest social media trends, a grandma dance crew, a more interactive game or all the other elements that make the Bananas quintessentially them, it’s clear the team is equally enjoyable to baseball and non-baseball fans.

Now, teams like the Orioles will make money from the sold-out games in their stadium.

Fans of both the Orioles and the Bananas seem happy to enjoy the experience.

“It’s such a wholesome activity,” Julienne Irwin, an avid Orioles fan, said. “It’s fun for anyone from 8 to 88, you know. Even my mom, who is not a sports fan whatsoever, can barely tell the difference between a soccer ball and a baseball, she’s very excited about the Bananas as well. So I just think it’s neat that it appeals to every fan level, every age level, and I’m excited to see what it’s all about.”