MLB takes minority stake in Jomboy Media, finally joins the content creator era of professional sports

It only took 15 years, but Major League Baseball finally realized that content creators might actually be good for the sport.

According to Eric Fisher at Front Office Sports, MLB just took a minority stake in Jomboy Media, the breakout Yankees fan-led brand known for lip-reading ejections, quirky breakdowns, and actually making baseball fun to watch on your phone.

The deal gives Jomboy access to official league and team intellectual property, opens the door for merch and sponsor collabs, and puts some of their content directly on league-owned platforms.

Yes, Major League Baseball, the league that used to slap bloggers with cease-and-desist orders for using a 3-second clip of a bloop single, is now partnering with the exact kind of creators it used to try and shut down.

According to MLB EVP of media and biz development Kenny Gersh, “We think having a strong content creator community is important for baseball.”

Shocker, right? Gersh says the league wants to help creators “get in front of more baseball fans,” which sounds great if you forget that MLB was basically trying to erase creators from existence not long ago.

This is the same league that, for most of the 2000s and 2010s, acted like anything outside of MLB.com was a threat to the sport’s sacred image.

Meanwhile, the NBA allowed fans repost clips, grow brands, and create a viral ecosystem around their stars. At the same time, Major League Baseball was still busy hiding highlights behind three paywalls and a sign-in screen from the early 2000s.

But hey, it appears they’ve finally come around…so that’s good

Maybe it was watching the PGA TOUR get roasted on social media for years, only to turn the whole thing into a W by partnering with creators and launching fan-driven media channels.

The “death of baseball” narrative was always nonsense.

The game never left—it was just being mismanaged by people allergic to YouTube and afraid of TikTok.

The Phillies didn’t need MLB Studios to make Weston Wilson or Otto Kemp go viral. They needed fans, creators, and dudes with iPhones. Now the league is finally trying to ride that wave instead of fighting it.

The big question is whether this changes Jomboy Media.

They say MLB won’t have “editorial control,” but if we’re being honest, when a league cuts you a check, there’s usually some version of “Hey, maybe tone down the umpire slander this week?” waiting in a text message.

Here at The Liberty Line, we were literally told by a certain basketball team that while we had the numbers (millions of page views a month, btw) the fact that we constantly talked about an “NBA Deep State” and made jokes about a certain NBA Owner while criticizing the organization that we write about daily, we wouldn’t be able to get credentials unless we re-consider the content used to cover the team.

Obviously, that simply wasn’t going to work for TLL and that was on a team-basis, not an entire league like Major League Baseball.

I do hope that won’t happen with MLB and Jomboy. If it does, you might have to kiss the best part of their company goodbye. The real magic of Jomboy Media is that it wasn’t sanitized. It made players human and it made the game funny, flawed, relatable.

So yeah, MLB finally entering the content game is obviously the right move. As long as they don’t try to turn Jomboy into just another in-house PR arm, we should be treading down the right path.

Let the creators cook, let the fans laugh, let baseball get a little messy. Easy peasy.

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