HARTFORD, Conn. — This dream, in its way, was born with Connor Harris.

“I came home from the hospital with a Yankee uniform on,” Harris says. “My Dad started calling me ‘Jeet’ when I was literally still in the hospital. So all my hometown friends in Avon, they still call me ‘Jeet,’ short for Derek Jeter.”

So as he played baseball with Avon Little Little League, Avon High, prep school and pitched for two Division I colleges, Harris harbored a dream to play at Yankee Stadium, where he used to sit in the upper deck to watch Jeter and the Yankees on Opening Day. The twists and turns of baseball and life will put him on the mound in the Bronx this weekend, to star with that wacky, world-famous and virally popular entertainment troupe, the Savannah Bananas.

“It means everything,” Harris says. “It’s truly a dream come true. I talk about the Savannah Bananas like ‘the dream I never knew I had,’ because in a regular baseball game, you can only do so much to impact others, but in a Savannah Bananas uniform, there’s just a way these kids look up to you, you have such a platform and such an opportunity to make an impact.”

The Bananas came though Hartford a couple of years ago and filled Dunkin Park to the gills. This summer, two of their satellite teams will perform here July 23-25, as the bright-yellow clad main roster tours big league venues. The top Bananas will face the Party Animals Saturday night at 7 and Sunday at 3 p.m. at Yankee Stadium, and both dates are sold out, as is the Bananas’ entire 2026 schedule.

The phenomenon is outgrowing even MLB’s largest stadiums. The Bananas played to 74,000 at Florida State’s football stadium, and they expect to fill 100,000-seat stadiums at Tennessee and Texas A&M during their 75-stadium tour across 45 states. Players salaries average in six figures. On various social media platforms, especially videos on Instagram and TikTok, followers and likes are no longer counted in millions, but hundreds of millions.

“In New Orleans, the staff came up to us and said the (Caesars Superdome) hadn’t looked like that since the Taylor Swift concert,” Harris says.

The current Bananas roster has three from Connecticut, including Jackson Olson from New Milford and UHart, one of the marquee attractions, and pitcher Trystan Levesque from East Lyme. Last spring, the organization’s talent scouts spotted Harris pitching as a grad student for Winthrop University, where he was trying to rekindle his pro ambitions after Tommy John ligament replacement surgery. His ERA was high, 7.18, but with 70 strikeouts and only nine walks in 73 innings, he had the most important skill to play Banana Ball.

“They want someone who is going to throw strikes,” Harris says, “because in Banana Ball, the worst thing you can do is walk people, because it’s not entertaining for fans and there is no opportunity for a trick play.”

At 6 feet 8, Harris would be taller than any player Savannah had, unless you count Dakota Albritton, who walks on stilts. The Bananas checked in with every coach they could find in Harris’ past, “even coaches I hadn’t seen in years,” he said, and were satisfied that he had the high-energy level and willingness to engage to fit in with the bunch.

“About halfway through my last year, my coach calls me in his office and he was like, ‘a scout called me about you,' ” Harris says. “And I was like, ‘what team?’ He said it was the Savannah Bananas, and ‘this is something you should look into.' ”

After spending last summer with one of the organization’s developmental teams, Harris, who turned 26 on April 20, was called up to the big Bananas last November for World Tour ’26. The team still performs many nights at its base, the minor league ballpark in Savannah, Ga., where they experiment, work out bugs in the routines and families come from all over to get up close and personal.

“My goal is to spread joy,” Harris says. “So you’ll always see me smiling out there. I have a strikeout celebration, it’s called the ‘Strikeout Sidekick.’ I’m a big dude, 6-8, so my legs go crazy and that’s part of the mix.”

Another trademark, Harris brings his family out onto the field with him, his father, Steve, his mother, Sharon, and it has gotten a great response. “I want to make sure everyone knows that loving your mom, loving your dad, loving your siblings, that’s a good thing, it’s not something that’s ‘not cool,' ” Connor says.

For Connor Harris, the most memorable parts of his first season have been the interaction with fans, especially the young ones. Where possible, Bananas players work the crowds.

“There was someone I met during one of our scrimmages in Savannah,” he says, “this kid, probably like 11 years old. His mom pulls me aside and tells me he’s debating quitting baseball because he has to get a surgery, and it was Tommy John surgery. So I went back up with him and sat with him in the stands for a whole inning, and told him how I almost quit baseball after my senior year in college because I didn’t want to go through that whole Tommy John process. … Then I saw him again in Anaheim and his mother told me he re-signed up for baseball and was in the middle of his season and he was loving it. That was a moment where I said, ‘wow, you have this power and this platform to go make an impact.’ And there’s countless other like that on a daily basis.”

Harris, who hopes to be a motivational speaker when his Banana Ball days come to an end, has had some meet-and-greet events in Avon and run camps in Connecticut when able to get home for a break from the pandemonium. He’s collected over 80 tickets for family and friends to see him at Yankee Stadium, living the dream he didn’t know he had.

“It’s so crazy to me,” he says. “Like, I grew up going to Yankees games and looking at these people like they were superheroes, looking at Jeter, looking at (Andy) Pettitte, these people I looked up to. And now, with the Bananas, these kids are looking up to you and they actually get a chance to meet you, and the minute you shake their hand they realize you are just like they are. We’re just people who have been blessed with an opportunity and worked hard for it, and I hope it inspires them.”

©2026 Hartford Courant. Visit courant.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.