O\u2019Brien was lucky, in a sense, that his presence back then was still pretty small. For a long time, Major League Baseball had a hard stance on copyright, claiming revenue from videos and forcing some non-licensed accounts to take the content down. O\u2019Brien received his own share of letters from the league\u2019s lawyers. Other leagues, particularly the N.B.A., were making cultural inroads in ways that M.L.B. was not. Eventually, the league started to see that influencers like O\u2019Brien were gaining the young followers that the league wanted.<\/p>\n
He may have been lucky, too, that he wasn\u2019t too young himself. By his late twenties, O\u2019Brien told me, when Jomboy\u2019s audiences started to grow, he understood his voice and had no interest in the kind of easy attention that came with being controversial. \u201cI think if I had started younger, it\u2019s probably easier to try and be angsty or edgy,\u201d he said. His company is often described as upbeat and light, the anti-Barstool\u2014a reference to the popular personality-driven sports-content company known for being abrasive and sometimes outright offensive. There\u2019s something to that. O\u2019Brien will stop himself from doing a video if he reads someone\u2019s lips and sees anything said that might genuinely get them in trouble. Recently, he quashed an idea to make merch quoting something that an injured Yankees\u2019 catcher said, which sounded funny out of context but was part of a sad, longer quote. O\u2019Brien isn\u2019t interested in causing fights, but he\u2019s also careful not to sound sanctimonious. He curses. He still likes reality TV. He enjoys content from companies that engage in all sorts of \u201cnonsense,\u201d as he puts it. (\u201cI gobble it up,\u201d he said.) He has built his career around \u201cmostly covering people who are losing their minds, screaming and cursing and probably doing something they\u2019re embarrassed of.\u201d But he\u2019s never forgotten that part of the fun of any story is in the retelling\u2014and everyone, even the guy who\u2019s losing his mind, likes to be in on the joke. The subjects of his videos generally \u201cseem to get a kick out of it,\u201d he said. So do increasing numbers of other people, even if they don\u2019t consider themselves baseball fans.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Brien\u2019s older sister, Courtney Hirsch, observed her brother\u2019s fledgling media company with both pride and, as a businesswoman, a certain itch. Hirsch had followed a more traditional route than her brother and had become an ad-sales executive at Uber. She knew that ads were the quickest way to monetize content creation, and she was convinced that her brother and Storiale could be doing better. In 2020, O\u2019Brien put out a feeler, through their mother and father, to see if Hirsch would help out. She responded that she\u2019d only do it if she were fully committed. \u201cI\u2019m a very all-or-nothing person,\u201d she told me. Before long, she became Jomboy Media\u2019s C.O.O., and then, in March, 2025, the C.E.O. The company now has sixty employees (including O\u2019Brien and Hirsch\u2019s youngest brother, Luke) and is projecting revenues to surpass twenty million dollars this year\u2014double what they were just two years ago. Last year, M.L.B. bought a minority stake in the company for an undisclosed sum, as part of its efforts to generate new fans.<\/p>\n
Is that campaign working? Maybe so. In the past few years, baseball has felt more widely popular, and there are numbers to back it up. Partly, the league has leaned into the international demographics of its players to cultivate a more global audience. The final of the World Baseball Classic, in which Venezuela defeated the United States, was watched by nearly eleven million people on Fox and Fox Deportes, more people than the average audience for the 2025 N.B.A. Finals. Last fall, the World Series, between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays, recorded its highest average viewership (15.7 million) since 2017. The Dodgers\u2019 generational superstar, Shohei Ohtani<\/a>, is the rare type of athlete whose name is known by non-sports fans. And the league\u2019s revenues are at a record high\u2014in part because of its active efforts to engage younger viewers, after years of dealing with the perception that baseball was too old and too outdated to survive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"O\u2019Brien was lucky, in a sense, that his presence back then was still pretty small. For a long…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":580324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1558,13090,10815,363,99],"class_list":["post-580323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-baseball","tag-major-league-baseball","tag-media","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/580324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}