MLB finally saw the light on creators like Jomboy and it's paying off big

There’s no doubt Major League Baseball is having a moment.

Game 7 of last year’s World Series was an instant classic, the World Baseball Classic finally made a jump into must-see TV and Opening Day attendance totals just ranked as the highest one-day aggregate in more than a decade.

There’s even a healthy debate on whether the league is again outpacing the NBA for second place in the minds of American sports fans. If Sports Illustrated were still putting out weekly magazines, it’d be a good time for it to pay homage to the memorable “Why the NHL’s Hot and the NBA’s Not” cover in 1994.

All of this is happening, mind you, amid some dark clouds: An impending labor war that threatens the 2027 season and a regional sports network landscape that lies in ruins.

So how did a league with past and future baggage come to enjoy this current sunshine?

There’s a wealth of reasons, including:

And then there’s this: After almost two decades of being resistant to letting fans use their content to create things for their own channels, Major League Baseball finally saw the light and is riding a wave of popularity spurred by non-traditional media outlets like Jomboy.

Time for a story.

Back in 2008, I started Big League Stew, the Major League Baseball blog on Yahoo Sports. There was meaning behind the name. I wanted each day’s collection of posts on the “Stew” to be a casserole of what makes baseball great. A typical writing shift might include items ranging from bizarre highlights to wardrobe malfunctions to analytical breakdowns for a game increasingly influenced by the Moneyball set.

While the baseball Internet at the time had a deep roster of blogs that focused on each area and team, Big League Stew was the place for everyone to gather and have fun sampling a bit of everything. For 10 years — a lifetime on the Internet — we did a great job of creating that place. Dave Brown was my hilarious consigliere and Mike Oz and Chris Cwik later came aboard to keep innovating.

We were Jomboy before Jomboy in many ways.

Yet here’s how different things were back then.

During my first year, Manny Ramirez made a catch at Camden Yards and high-fived a Red Sox fan over the wall before throwing the ball back in to double a runner off first base.

The moment was perfect for what Big League Stew and Yahoo Sports were all about. I took a video of the highlight off my television screen — yes, that’s how primitive things were back then — and posted it on the blog after adding some commentary.

A programming editor linked the post on Yahoo’s front page and it received an instant and giant surge of traffic. A few hours later, I got a call from my boss, which I presumed would be a Manny Ramirez wall high-five for acting quickly and generating a couple of million page views.

I got chewed out instead.

My boss had heard from his boss who’d heard from his boss.

The head of Major League Baseball Advanced Media had placed a call to the top levels of Yahoo and promised to blow up their relationship if any unauthorized video ever appeared on our site again.

My bad.

We never posted any video highlights on Big League Stew again until Yahoo Sports gained official video rights 4-5 seasons later.

The calculus that MLBAM official made was clear.

He needed the signature on a deal from the biggest Internet platform in the world at that point, not the powerful and nimble distribution to millions that my front page producer and I could quickly deliver.

He wanted a rev share on a highlight in an official video player that was preceded by a clunky 30-second, non-skippable pre-roll, not an easily accessible highlight packaged by someone passionate about the league.

All of it was defensible, particularly in 2008. The official had 30 teams to answer to, plus a pocket full of rightsholders. MLBAM was already a streaming pioneer, well on its way to becoming one of the most valuable media-tech properties anywhere.

Putting IP out into the wind as a growth strategy wasn’t a thought nor a need, not even for the NBA at that point. Highlights were the moat, to be protected at all costs, whether it was from a big outlet like Yahoo or someone doing it in their spare time.

But the landscape started to shift. Smartphone use exploded. Twitter and Instagram were born. Facebook and YouTube cemented themselves into daily American life. Streaming video became more and more prevalent.

Once the exclusive province of a few sportswriters and announcers in each town, sports content creation was open to literally everyone.

The NBA saw the value in having people creating and distributing around their product in the 2010s and rode it to a wave of engagement and growth.

The NFL and MLB were much more conservative throughout the decade and even aggressive from time to time with enforcement.

That’s not to say MLB was incapable of being progressive. The MLB FanCave launched in 2012 and was an idea before its time. Many of their team social media accounts set the standard for both voice and fan interaction throughout the year.

But the content was always on their terms and from their teams.

That started to change when Jomboy hit the scene.

Jimmy O'Brien — a Yankees fan from New Jersey who goes by Jomboy online — started lip-reading dugout arguments on YouTube in 2019. A piece on Aaron Boone went viral overnight and the phrase "savages in the box" became a thing.

Jomboy had an incredible knack for editing videos and his piece on the Astros’ cheating scandal (above) took the channel to even bigger heights, as did the hours of evergreen content he created during the pandemic.

By 2024, Jomboy Media had crossed $10 million in annual revenue and grown to over 2 million YouTube subscribers. Encouraged by the success, other baseball-focused creators started to form their own universe on YouTube.

Despite forming partnerships with the Yankees and Aaron Boone, Jomboy still wasn’t immune from the occasional copyright notice from the league. He also said in a stream that a potential deal with ESPN was quashed by the league a few years back.

But by June 2025, the league decided it could no longer resist the inevitable and purchased a minority stake in Jomboy Media. The deal gave Jomboy access to highlights and the full weight of MLB’s distribution muscle.

The Manny Ramirez wall high-five would have done numbers.

The returns came fast. During the 2025 postseason, Jomboy Media generated over 2 billion cross-platform views, a 76 percent increase year over year.

During this year's World Baseball Classic, the company put up 933 million views and 32 million engagements across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms.

Jomboy isn't the whole story, either.

None of this happened by accident. It happened because MLB finally understood what the NBA figured out a decade earlier. Fans making things about your product isn't a threat. It's a way to get the next generation of fans finding and consuming the sport where they live.

And considering it’s harder and more expensive than ever to follow your team on streaming services, MLB needs to be in as many free spots as possible.

It also needs to be accessible to as many generations as possible.

While there’s plenty of room in baseball for the Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectuses of the world, the casual fan still wants things that don’t require a spreadsheet: The Jomboy breakdowns, the viral fan plays in the stands, the stuff you watch when you’re taking a break from homework.

Jomboy and this generation of creators are the 2026 equivalent of a Manny Ramirez wall high-five: Instantly viral, completely shareable, and extremely valuable in helping Major League Baseball grow.

Here’s hoping the league continues making it easier and not harder for the next Big League Stew or Jomboy to do their thing.

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