What I’m Watching: Jomboy

Sometime during the baseball season I stumbled upon a YouTube channel called Jomboy Media. Jomboy has a fantastic channel, with many videos of just a few minutes, called “breakdowns”. Each one focuses on a single part of a game, usually a baseball game, and makes it entertaining. That in itself is a huge achievement considering that I am not a big of fan baseball, would never watch a full baseball game, and would not of my own volition seek to understand all the nuances of the game.

What is interesting to me is that this channel has actually made me more interested in baseball than I was before, which, as stated, is no small feat. No major sports media outlet has ever interested me in how a pitcher may be tipping his pitches, or how players on different baseball teams react to one another. What sets Jomboy Media apart is that it brings me as the viewer into the baseball world and makes it more personal and human. The main way this is done is through very good lip-reading and second-by-second narration of what the players in the video are saying and thinking. Did I mention that it is done in a very humorous way? The point of the video is to entertain, but in doing so, some videos inevitable educate the viewer on the mentality of the players, the unknown rules of the game, and the minute details that I would never have picked up on if I were watching a typicall broadcast.

Of course, Jomboy doesn’t just cover baseball. The most popular video to date is a commentary on the 2012 Inuit Ear Pulling championship. If it sounds silly, just watch the video while listening to Jomboy (Jimmy O’Brien) do the commentary. Between that, Finnish Baseball, Teqball, and many other unusual sports, there is a lot of good material for Jomboy’s entertaining commentary.

But the channel isn’t just cheap entertainment. Jomboy was actually on the leading edge of the cheating scandal from the Houston Astros 2017 season. Just hours after The Athletic posted details of the subject for the first time, Jomboy Media had a video up breaking down exactly how the Astros were making noise in the dugout to signal certain pitches to the batter, and that the information gained at that speed could never have been done without using a camera. The breakdown format is hilarious when dubbing over a player’s thoughts in an already-entertaining situation, and it is also informative for investigating details. It’s clearly a format that is working well for Jomboy, and one that shows how online sports content is very much different than traditional cable television sports coverage.

Online, as a viewer I am much faster to change pages or videos, meaning that the videos of just a few minutes are perfect. I don’t really need a former player or experienced television presenter to narrate everything to me. Certainly, inside knowledge of the sport is needed for the more in-depth breakdowns, which is where Jomboy shows that he knows his stuff. I don’t want to wait until the end of the season for a well-compiled Top 10 list. I might just be interested to see something unusual that happened yesterday for a minute or two.

To be honest, I think that it’s better to get the information from an intelligent sports fan that to get it from a sports celebrity. When watching Jomboy, it feels like a friend is sharing something funny and interesting with me, and I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the narrator. By comparison, I think too many of the modern commentators and personaltiies found on television seem to be injecting themselves as a type of character into the story. They do this with funny voices or fake outrage, but I would prefer to just be entertained by the sports rather than a sideshow. Jomboy’s entertainment comes directly from the baseball action itself, which (again), is quite impressive considering just how unentertaining I normally find baseball.

I think my interest in Jomboy’s channel and my continual visits to see what new breakdowns have been published shows an alternative to traditional television sports journalism. Whether or not that ends up being ultimately beneficial for sports business or players, or even viewers, remains to be seen. At the very least, I can affirm that Jomboy’s channel is highly entertaining, and has shed new light on baseball for me.