MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred admitted his league took the wrong approach to digital media during years when it harshly scrutinized content creators.
Manfred joined “The Pat McAfee Show” during MLB All-Star festivities where the former NFL punter asked the commissioner about the league’s shift in its digital strategy. McAfee mentioned the change in recent years, from an antagonistic relationship with creators to now a deal between MLB and Jomboy Media.
“The problem is we got into this thing where we thought we could drive everything to our platforms,” Manfred said. When he became commissioner, he said, people “came to [him] and said, ‘We got this wrong, we’re just in the wrong place. We’re trying to drive everybody here, the right strategy is to make sure we are where the people are.’ You gotta go where people are going.
“And that shift has been a really good thing for us, a really good thing for us,” Manfred said.
In June, MLB purchased a minority stake in Jomboy Media. The deal gave MLB no oversight of editorial content, but increased Jomboy’s access while putting some of its content on league channels.
It was a stark switch-up for the league, which had initially resisted Jomboy’s growing presence since it first went viral in 2019. Jimmy “Jomboy” O’Brien said in 2024 that he and other creators annually received a mass notice of copyright violations from MLB.
“They’re just a little egregious with the sweeps,” O’Brien said, adding that MLB had even claimed college videos from creators. “The whole system’s bizarre.”
But baseball has since changed its tune. In addition to the Jomboy deal, earlier this year, MLB re-upped a deal with Boardroom that would put an increased focus on “player-driven content and storytelling.”
“We think having a strong content creator community is important for baseball,” the league’s EVP of media and business development Kenny Gersh told Front Office Sports last month.
