The popular baseball content duo Céspedes Family BBQ is moving to Yahoo Sports, putting Yahoo back on the map in a sport the company once dominated.
Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman built out their mix of audio, video and written content starting in college nearly a decade ago. They made pit stops at MLB.com, DAZN, The Ringer, Fox and SiriusXM before this move to Yahoo, which beefs up the baseball side of Yahoo Sports as it continues a transformation under new president Ryan Spoon and head of content Sam Farber.
At Yahoo, the Céspedes Family BBQ duo (named after a viral meme of fan-favorite outfielder Yoenis Céspedes) hopes finding an overall home will give passionate baseball fans a one-stop-shop to geek out about America’s pastime.
“Jake and I have been doing this professionally for five years now, and our stuff’s been kind of all over the place,” Shusterman told Awful Announcing. “Which has been fun at times but also a little bit chaotic. So this stood out as an opportunity to really build their baseball coverage with us, and having podcasts and writing be both part of that was really exciting.”
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For Yahoo, it’s a home-run example of how the company prioritizes multiplatform journalists under its new leadership.
“The way that they look at the world and the type of content that they create fits really perfectly with our vision for how we want to show up in the future of Yahoo Sports,” Farber told Awful Announcing.
Yahoo has continued making big moves after bringing on Jori Epstein and Charles McDonald to cover the NFL in the fall of 2022. Since Spoon took over last summer, Yahoo has also added Nate Tice and Jason Fitz on the NFL in addition to Dan Devine on the NBA, plus Mintz and Shusterman now on baseball.
Long an incubator for sports news-breakers like Jeff Passan and Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo also brought on college sports insider Ross Dellenger and NBA insider Jake Fischer.
Yahoo made layoffs in early December across its entire company, with MLB writers Hannah Keyser and Zach Crizer among those let go.
Yahoo management stated the layoffs were directed toward future alignment and growth.
“We have ambitious plans for Yahoo in 2024 and beyond,” Yahoo communications chief Sona Iliffe-Moon said in a statement last year. “As we work to elevate our category-leading properties to better serve customers, we need the right talent and roles in place. Our intention is to continue to invest in key initiatives for an even richer experience across Yahoo’s properties.”
Farber said Yahoo is increasingly focused on staffing with personalities who educate and inform sports fans, especially in an engaging and fun style.
“Our mantra in our Yahoo Sports content group is we want to make fans smarter. That’s our Northstar,” he said. “Then it’s also … are they entertaining? Are they engaging? You could deliver facts and a dry manner and that they fit within the umbrella of making sports fans smarter, but I don’t think it’s necessarily engaging and fun and reflective of who we want to be. So there’s a subjective element, and then there’s also just the objective element of how does the person or people resonate on a variety of platforms.”
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Farber listened to Mintz and Shusterman’s podcast prior to ever pursuing them to work at Yahoo. He saw how popular they were on social media and among diehard baseball fans. The pair was a logical target when it came time to build out Yahoo’s baseball content arm. So while the layoffs may have appeared to signal Yahoo’s pivot away from baseball coverage, it was more about finding the right creators.
As frequent free agents in their five years together as professional partners, Mintz and Shusterman are used to pitching their brand of baseball content, and sometimes defending baseball content overall.
“At Fox, it was different because … they had the rights to TV,” Mintz told Awful Announcing. “And so they were producing baseball content for that. What is awesome about Yahoo is that they believe in baseball coverage for the sake of baseball.”
At Yahoo, the duo plans to make its podcast available on YouTube, a first immediately. They hope to build more of a coherent brand, where someone reading an article may find a breakdown video or podcast episode embedded while reading. Or perhaps a podcast listener can click straight over to a breakdown on the same YouTube channel. It’s an alignment they have not had before.
The ability to continue covering games and reporting on the sport live was also important to both hosts. While Mintz drummed up some controversy surrounding the NLCS last year while at Fox, he and Shusterman are comfortable covering games these days. It broadens their relationship with the sport in a way that even being friendly with players, as they both are, doesn’t hold a candle to. Neither studied journalism in school and is getting used to writing on deadlines and managing the flow of feature writing in addition to news coverage. Still, both agreed it’s vital to their approach to covering baseball now.
“I think the information, access, perspective we get from being around all the time, from being in clubhouses, from talking to players, from being on the field, right, that just informs our perspective even more and gives us a deeper understanding for the sport,” Mintz said. “Now that that’s in my bag, I never want to take it out.”
The emphasis on spreading its journalists’ content across multiple platforms has had great early returns for Yahoo. Farber said the company had record-breaking months on social media in December and January. Farber is pleased with the readership for its Yahoo Sports AM newsletter, which it poached from Axios last year.
Since Yahoo has a more significant editorial sports staff than many outlets these days, Farber believes it is responsible for providing full coverage to as many fans as possible. That means breaking news, scores, highlights, statistics, analysis, and commentary all day, every day.
One team member is Amy Brachmann, an editor who worked with the Cespedes guys at Fox and was a driving force in their interest in joining Yahoo.
“The idea of her being someone that we talk to every day as we build our coverage is incredibly invigorating,” Mintz emphasized.
A quick scan of media headlines is enough evidence that the churn of sports content companies is not slowing down. Priorities change quickly. Yahoo, owned by private equity firm Apollo Global (for now), is no exception. However, despite a small round of recent layoffs, new leadership, vision, and real investment across multiple sports have Yahoo looking up.
With the baseball season approaching, Céspedes Family BBQ is the latest addition to bring Yahoo content to more sports fans in more places.
