On a balmy evening last year in Savannah, Georgia, Robert Anthony Cruz (’21) ran in to catch a high fly ball in left field. From the bleachers, it would have looked like he overran the ball, a rookie error. But then he did something only three players before him had ever done: He launched into a backflip and made the catch for the third out of the inning.

Not a single coach in the MLB would be happy with a stunt like that, but the Savannah Bananas are blazing new trails as a professional baseball team that aims to entertain by any means possible. The video of Cruz’s catch was on the team’s YouTube channel by the end of the weekend.

He goes by “Coach RAC” on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, and nearly 2 million people follow him for his punchy baseball training videos. But Cruz is first and foremost a man of faith.

“Faith is a part of everything I do on the field,” he says. “That means I don’t have to get my affirmation from performing well. I don’t have to be a star to feel content inside, because my value comes from the one who created me. I don’t have to earn any favor in his sight because of what Jesus has accomplished. So when I step onto the field, I can play freely, and through success and failure be content knowing my identity is secure either way.”

Cruz was homeschooled and grew up playing baseball in California’s Inland Empire. He briefly attended the University of California, Riverside, before enrolling at 51 in search of a faith community that would include both the classroom and the ball field. Early on, he was befriended by an upperclassman, Anj Bourgeois, who met him at the batting cages before every practice for prayer. (The two now run a training program, Not Your Average Baseball Camp, that hosts free youth clinics around the country.)

“My time at 51 gave me so many opportunities to utilize all of my giftings and interests beyond just baseball,” he said. “As a believer who also happens to play baseball, it was the perfect environment, because I didn’t have to tiptoe — I could integrate my faith into every area of my life.”

The summer after his junior year, a phone call from the Washington Nationals turned his world upside down. On receiving the news, he had just enough time to visit his father at work and tell him he’d been signed as an undrafted free agent — and just enough prescience to ask his mom to film his dad’s reaction. and it went viral, leading to a flurry of heartwarming articles and broadcasts from national news outlets, including a .

Cruz assumed that would be the end of his social media career as he headed east to join his new team.

In the minor leagues, Cruz soon dealt with a case of what ballplayers call “the yips,” which he described as a mental block that, in his case, resulted from being positioned at third base — one of his least familiar positions. The crisis led to a turning point in Cruz’s testimony and some soul searching with his pastor.

“In hindsight, my identity was in how I was performing on the field,” Cruz said. “But experiencing so much adversity and failure at that level forced me to put my identity in other things, and ended up being a really strong faith-building experience.”

He overcame the yips, and was playing well in early 2022 when he was unexpectedly cut with a number of other players from the Nationals organization.

For a year and a half, he drifted, not knowing whether he should still try to play the game he loves. He stayed in shape. He returned to his TikTok account and started posting training videos. Then there was a tryout for an upstart team with a quirky approach to the game — and a distinct appetite for players who know how to entertain.

The Savannah Bananas have been called the Harlem Globetrotters of professional baseball, and are known for their fun and energetic approach to the game. The team was part of a collegiate league until 2022, when it went strictly professional, and the organization has grown quickly enough to field five teams.

Coach RAC currently plays left field, and wears No. 15. If the Savannah Bananas are quickly becoming a household name for their antics, Cruz can play that game. Nearly a year after his first backflip catch, he repeated the feat — now a signature move — in front of a sold-out crowd of 65,000 at the home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (one of many NFL and MLB stadiums on the 2025 Banana Ball World Tour). During the same game, he blasted a towering two-run homer, drawing massive cheers with his acrobatic aerials and front handsprings as he rounded the bases.

The over-the-top fun has certainly garnered attention. Cruz now tallies more than 963,000 followers on , 660,000 on and 501,000 on . In July 2024, three years to the day after being signed by the Nationals, he was the subject of an in-depth profile on the cover of the Washington Post’s sports section.

Cruz said he frequently returns to what he learned at 51, from interpersonal relationships to Christian ministry to leadership — and, not least, his experiences among the tight-knit Eagles baseball community. But at the top of the list has always been the university’s emphasis on integrating faith and life in every field of endeavor.

“Coming back into the game of baseball after being out for a while, that was at the forefront of my mind: How can I play this game to the glory of God and not make it about me?” he said. “I don’t want to make it about me.”

For someone at the frontier of so many opportunities, Cruz doesn’t know what the future holds. For now, he’s content to play the game and seize the next chance he gets to tell people about the Savior whose perfect performance is the only one that matters: “My goal is to be a good ambassador for Christ in everything I do, with the Bananas and beyond.”

Photo credit: Chris Bernacchi / Diamond Images via Getty Images