Syracuse, N.Y. — Before Dakota Albritton was smacking baseballs while wearing stilts as a member of the Savannah Bananas, he was building swimming pools. Before that he worked as a pipe-fitter in a paper mill. And before that repairing broken vacuum pumps.
With a job in hand and two years between him and his last high school baseball game, Albritton’s mother shocked him in 2021 when she told him she’d signed him up for a baseball tryout.
“I said, ‘Well, why’d you do that? I haven’t played ball in two years,’ ” Albritton recalled. “She said that in the tryout announcement they said to bring your weirdest talent.”
That is how Albritton, a native of Ellaville, Georgia, a small town with a population of fewer than 2,000 people, parlayed a childhood Christmas present into becoming one of the premier attractions in one of the most popular sports entertainment acts in the United States.
Albritton performed in front of a crowd nearly six times larger than his hometown on Thursday at NBT Bank Stadium, where a sold-out crowd of 10,815 people watched the Savannah Bananas perform with their rivals, the Party Animals.
Albritton’s story explains much of the success of the team, a brainstorm of team founder and owner Jesse Cole, who turned a college league wooden-bat baseball team into a professional barnstorming organization that has sold out 70 games in 33 destinations across the country this year alone.
The Syracuse show sold out in hours when tickets went on sale in July. Those who tried to get in via the secondary market found prices of more than $100 for a general admission seat, likely making it the hottest ticket to a sporting event in Syracuse this year.
Albritton said he’d played baseball since he was a child. He was good enough as a senior to help his team to a state title game appearance. He got a pair of stilts as a Christmas gift when he was 10. He remembers being able to walk around naturally in them immediately.
Once he’d learned to walk,…
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