One recent morning, Jimmy O’Brien climbed into the elevator to his office in Midtown Manhattan, iced black coffee in hand, and had Rocco Baldelli’s escape in mind.
“If you don’t put it out first, people will get upset,” O’Brien said.
For the next two and a half hours, he squinted at the early morning glare of his corner office while Minnesota Twins manager Baldelli fumed and raged on the two screens in front of him. We scrutinized every syllable of Baldelli’s interactions with the referee as if they were crime footage.
pause. rewind. Slow motion. pause. rewind.
“Oh!” cried O’Brien.
He exhaled, read Baldelli’s lips, deciphered the code, and continued: They just don’t call it.
He entered the sentence into a script that he later narrated. His YouTube video has over 1 million views.
Compared to other managers’ tirades, Baldelli’s confrontation was decidedly milquetoast — a low-stakes blast against a close call at home plate in the midst of baseball’s Dog Day. Don’t miss the many opportunities to entertain and often enlighten your audience. He built a digital sports media empire on top of that.
Jomboy Media, a startup born out of O’Brien’s GIF-laden social media feeds and growing exponentially after covering the baseball scandal, will nearly triple its workforce to 64 employees starting in 2021 increased to We recently closed a $5 million funding round. A round led by a creative artist agency that includes a handful of athletes and celebrities. It’s the type of legitimacy that ruins anything born of love, but so far O’Brien and his company have made the transition from hobby to big business without escaping what made them relatable in the first place. I have managed.
From a bright white office space whose walls are adorned with poster boards, mock plaques, and images of frogs (the company’s mascot), Jomboy’s employees are making videos for their 1.6 million YouTube subscribers and some 900,000 more followers. Fill your company feed with a variety of sports clips. on twitter and instagram. The company’s podcast network currently includes about 20 shows. In March, Jomboy will broadcast Yankees games. He partnered with YES Network to produce content and simulcast programming.
At the center of it all was the sports media personality that I never set out to be. O’Brien, 33, has grizzled hair, piercing blue eyes, a thick beard, and a husky voice that’s perfect for sports talk her radio. Except he’s never been interested in broadcasting.
“I don’t call myself a reporter,” O’Brien said. “I’m still a biased fan, and I have no plans to change.”
O’Brien and his best friend and creative partner, Jake Storial, co-host Talkin’ Yanks, a post-game podcast for the Yankees. In August, the show’s tone grew more somber as the No. 1 Yankees passed out. But they refuse to compare to take-driven sports commentary, full of rants on the radio dial.
“I think what we provide is conversations that people actually have with their peers,” said O’Brien.
Negativity is not part of the atmosphere here.
The company’s rise from fun friend to full-blown media outlet can be traced to just one viral moment. November 2019, The Athletic It broke the story of the Houston Astros’ sophisticated scheme to tip hitters for pitches. It was a video breakdown that identified lip reading and other clues at a White Sox game.
The video went viral on social media, making Jomboy’s account a must-see on baseball Twitter. O’Brien has been away from working full-time as a wedding videographer for three years. It’s been a year since he started the podcast with his Storyle, who worked in marketing for an electronics conglomerate in Denver.
Suddenly, followers wanted more of O’Brien’s editing artistry. Since then, he has had breakdowns that include cricket, lacrosse, pickleball, ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and a slap of Will His Smith’s Chris His Rock at the Oscars.
As the company has grown, O’Brien and Storiale have maintained the positivity and energy that made them popular in the first place. Their jokes adhere to their greatest principle, which O’Brien calls “fun without being funny.”
“The easiest way to get a laugh is to put other people down or be negative,” he said. “It’s really not our vibe.”
Although this can be interpreted as an attempt at integrity, he insists it is not out of their character.
“We’ve both been diagnosed as conflict-averse because I have a sister who had a fight with her mother,” O’Brien joked. “We were peacemakers.”
They call themselves the “applause company” because they are so supportive of their colleagues. When the team traveled to Los Angeles to film and network during his All-Star game festivities this year, he rented his Airbnb rather than a hotel room.
“All 20 of us stayed together,” said O’Brien, who lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey with his wife and 10-month-old son. That’s how I was raised and that’s what I love to do.Everybody wakes up at different times and they go to the kitchen and bagels come out.That’s what we do.We’ll see how long we can do it. .”
So far, Major League Baseball and its many players have benefited, including Chicago Cubs outfielder Ian Happ, who hosts a weekly podcast on Jomboy’s network. It also spawned a lot of silly content that was clearly designed to generate traffic rather than sophisticated discourse.
Joe Favorito, a sports industry analyst and lecturer in the sports management program at Columbia University, is on the path blazed by Barstool Sports, an anti-government media group now worth more than $500 million. It was in contrast to Jonboy’s more goofy and glamorous approach.
“They’re a not-so-edgy premise of what Barstool is all about,” says Favorito. “They take a unique and irreverent stance and respect baseball — they have really good insight.”
Jomboy’s ability to escape the toxicity and polarization of social media is why it has attracted high-profile investors such as Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and Seven Seven Six, which participated in its latest funding round.
“The pendulum is back,” Ohanian wrote in an email. “People crave good vibes.”
He added: I think it goes beyond the Yankees fanbase. I would love to see them extend even deeper into other sports. “
O’Brien still selects, edits, and narrates his popular “breakdown” videos himself, averaging 3-4 hours per video.
His supernatural ability to read lips is a mystery. O’Brien says he has a knack for that.
“I was watching a game with my dad and when a pitcher came down from the mound screaming, he would pause and rewind and say, ‘Jim, what did he say? asked me,” said O’Brien. “And I will tell him.”
Some visual cues are easier to decipher than others. For example, O’Brien struggled for hours trying to pinpoint a particular phrase shouted by Yankees manager Aaron Boone when he was ejected in July for arguing to call a strike.
“I was watching it and I was like, ‘I’m sure he said ‘buffer zone,”” O’Brien said. “A Google search recently came up with a whole article about how an MLB umpire has his two-inch buffer his zone on the side of the plate.”
He made a video explaining the buffer zone and why Boone was trying to burst a blood vessel. It has been played 735,000 times.
“He’s a great storyteller,” said Andrew Patterson, former senior director of new media at MLB Advanced Media, who was hired as Jomboy Media’s first CEO in July. “What he finds isn’t always the highlight moments. Often they are small moments that are often overlooked. “
Jomboy, who does not yet have his own website, continues to build a large social media presence.O’Brien last month I cut the video and posted it This quickly surpassed his Twitter views record (37 million impressions). Oklahoma Little was the highlight of his 58 seconds as a player in his league comforted a pitcher who had just hit his head on a pitch.
O’Brien was in high spirits that day for a different reason. He had received messages from Twins manager Baldelli and a close friend of his.
“He said Baldelli told me to say, ‘You nailed it,'” O’Brien said.
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