Almost daily, a new video from the New York Yankees’ TikTok account asks players various questions as they walk into the team’s facilities at spring training down in Tampa, FL.
“Which teammate would you not want to sit next to on the team plane?”
“What was your favorite childhood TV show?”
They show Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and Juan Soto joking around. There is a look at Anthony Volpe putting in extra fielding work at shortstop or Gerrit Cole loosening up during a bullpen session.
But who is working behind the camera to make all of this content?
Ryan Callahan, who went to DeSales University for TV/film, spent hours carefully splicing video together, which directly transferred to a job with the NBA media center where he logged games, edited highlights for the associated social channels, and produced a nightly Snapchat show. Even with all that, social media was not the omnipresent giant force the way it is now.
“When I graduated college in 2017, social media wasn’t really a course you could take,” Callahan told amNewYork. “So really through my work as a [content] editor and understanding my platforms at the NBA, what should go on what channels, vertical, square [or] wide content, where it should live, that’s kind of where my understanding of all that came.”
While Callahan took a similar job with the Yankees in 2019, a year later he relied heavily on the film fundamentals from school: longer form videos and packages, and saw an almost instant payoff in his first project with the Yankees where he wrote the script for the tribute video dedicated to Derek Jeter after he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“I grew up idolizing Derek Jeter so to have a project to write a script for a video, telling the story of Derek’s career, I sat down and wrote that story from the heart of 12-year-old Ryan,” Callahan said about his Emmy-award-winning work. “That was a piece that was really rewarding for me, [it] ended playing at the stadium when we honored him for being selected to the Hall of Fame.”
A more recent popular video was his sit-down with highly-touted prospect Jasson Dominguez after his first major-league at-bat, where he homered on his first swing off of future Hall-of-Famer Justin Verlander in Houston, no less.
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Julia Schorr predicted this in her future. She knew that she wanted to pursue graphic design, and did so from high school throughout college. But what she didn’t account for was finding her love for this in her college newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I was a design editor and then a digital director, and I think that that’s where I found a love for social media,” Schorr said. “I’ve always been drawn to sports [and] I definitely have always had that creative muscle when it comes to the graphic design side.”
With a game-recognizes-game mentality, Callahan said that the social media and videography coverage of NCAA football was a huge source of inspiration for him, saying that he’s been
particularly passionate about leveling up the Bronx Bombers’ videography similar to what’s put out by D1 institutions.
For Schorr, as it relates to fun and energetic graphic designs and punny captions, her bread and butter is the city around her and the field in which she works.
“We’re constantly on Twitter, TikTok, whatever comes across my own personal feed,” Schorr said. “If I see something, I’ll bookmark it and look to that for inspiration. A lot of the inspiration comes from our surroundings, so being in New York, there’s definitely a culture surrounding the city, whether it’s riding the subway and seeing subway art or looking up at the sky, we incorporate that identity into our graphics.”
Back to those question-of-the-days that we started with – those happen to be Schorr’s favorite
vehicle of telling stories because it helps show more to the players than the numbers on their
backs.
“Coming up with those questions and being able to see the players’ personalities, see some
behind the scenes, I’ve really enjoyed that,” Schorr said. “One of the funniest ones was when we had the guys imitate [starting pitcher] Nestor Cortes’ wind-up; just having a playful [and] lighthearted moment has been fun to put out there.”
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