Noah Katz ’26 was ready for his close-up

Noah Katz ’26 needs no thesaurus when asked to describe what it was like to walk onto the field at Fenway Park and umpire a game in front of a sellout crowd of 37,000 raucous fans. He easily comes up with a host of adjectives, “incredible,” “cool,” and “surreal” among them.

Katz patrolled the right field line as part of the crew that umpired the June 8 Savannah Bananas game in the historic ballpark. The Bananas have attracted a nationwide following for playing a fast-paced, crowd-pleasing brand of baseball in which the players break out into spontaneous dance numbers and engage in comic antics that draw comparisons to basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters. It’s as much a piece of performance art as it is an athletic exhibition.

The junior marketing major established a relationship with the Bananas while filming the team for The Umpire Channel, which he founded and maintains as “the leading source of umpiring-related content in the world.”

“I fell in love with Savannah and with the team,” he says. “I did a day in the life of the umpires, coaches, and players, and later realized I could umpire for the team.”

At Fenway, Katz enjoyed the perks of being an insider, suiting up inside the locker room and taking a tour inside the towering left field wall, aka The Green Monster. He even got to add his signature to the thousands already scribbled behind the scoreboard by famous ballplayers over many generations.

“It was an out-of-the-world experience,” he marvels. “A childhood dream that I was able to live out.”

Katz next umpires for the Savannahs on July 14 at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., and August 10 at Cleveland’s Progressive Field.