Meet a baseball guy making cricket fun in the US ahead of the T20 World Cup

On a cold March day in Jersey City, the warehouse looks unremarkable from the outside. Surrounded by a mesh fence under a noisy flyover bridge, there is little of note in the bleakly industrial area apart from the cannabis shop next door. But inside is the world of a sports-loving child’s fantasies: a cavernous room transformed into a field of play.

On the menu is Ball in Play, a meld of cricket and baseball, where players wear bucket hats and bubblegum-coloured kits. The walls are adorned with team banners bearing preposterous names: The Woogas, Love Yas, McFlurry Power and Forgotten Rotten.

It is here that 35-year-old Jimmy O’Brien, aka Jomboy, is enjoying the realisation of his dream.

The founder of Jomboy Media has overseen the booming expansion of his empire from a two-man podcast to an organisation employing more than 60 people in an office and studio complex near the Empire State Building in New York City and the New Jersey warehouse.

Jomboy’s success has been built on podcasts and videos analysing baseball and other American sports but, almost by chance, O’Brien discovered a late love for cricket. He could not possibly have imagined it leading him to one of cricket’s most coveted broadcasting roles.

O’Brien, an American who has never played cricket, will join a commentary team of the game’s former star players and elite broadcasters at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2024.

An accidental cricket fan

O’Brien first encountered cricket as a six-year-old in Australia.

His family spent two years living in the Sydney suburb of Lindfield, and O’Brien has vague memories of schoolyard games during recess at the Holy Family Primary School.

“I didn’t actually play it when we lived there, just in the schoolyard,” O’Brien tells Al Jazeera.

“I watched more rugby and Aussie rules on TV. But my dad had a company outing where they played cricket and I was with all the other kids, playing. I didn’t know the rules. I knew that you run back and forth to score runs.”

Back in the US, O’Brien pursued a career in sports media, initially as a videographer.

In 2017, he started a podcast on his beloved New York Yankees as a hobby with his best friend Jake Storiale.

“I was just like, I’m going to build a Twitter account and make content about the Yankees because I have no one to talk about them with and I’m bored. And then they had a good season out of nowhere. They went to the playoffs so our podcasts grew. We thought it was big. Maybe 1,000 people listened.

“But it was growing. I got a small investment of 25 grand to quit and try to do it full-time for a year. Jake got fired and was searching for a new job and I was like, wanna split half of this nothing with me?”

O’Brien combined an uncanny talent for lip-reading with forensic video research to analyse everything from strategy to alleged cheating in Major League Baseball. In 2019 several videos went viral and Jomboy’s following skyrocketed.

‘Not a cricket snob yet’

A combination of fatherhood and the COVID-19 pandemic reconnected O’Brien to cricket. His son, James, was born in November 2021, during the Men’s T20 World Cup in the United Arab Emirates.

O’Brien spent the next five days shuttling between the hospital and a hotel room which did not have access to the internet or cable television.

“I had watched [Australian documentary] The Test on Amazon because I really like Australian media and I don’t want to forget about that part of my life. So I watched The Test, season one, and that kind of got it back on the brain.

“When I was in the hospital, the T20 World Cup was the only thing live. And then I watched a tonne [of cricket] when I was on paternity leave.”