At a glance, Jon Bois’ body of work is so eclectic that it’s hard to bind him on even a related group of topics, ranging from political documentaries to deep statistical sports analysis to multi-media speculative sci-fi.
It’s not as if he hasn’t received acclaim in these areas, either. The serialised video series/novella 17776 won a national magazine award, and was long-listed for the best novella and best graphic story Hugo award. The History of Seattle Mariners (2020), on which he collaborated with Alex Rubinstein as part of the Dorktown series, also collected both film and television awards.
On top of this, Bois is credited as an inspiration for a few of the truly great YouTube-based documentarian filmmakers. Summoning Salt, the great speed-running documentary maker, Napoleon Blownapart, the great MMA documentary maker, and Kevan Bridges aka BobbyBroccoli, the great science controversy filmmaker, cite him as a direct influence on their work. You can see it, too. Although Bois is hard to pin down on genre or topic, his style is recognisable from outer space.
I am not an American. This fact causes me little to no trouble in day to day life, but over the years I did come to realise that I was missing something profound, and that thing was baseball. You don’t have to ‘like’ baseball or anything, but it’s important to me that you understand a few things about it for me to get across what makes Jon Bois seem such a unique and brilliant filmmaker.
1 – It’s effectively rounders but the dude throwing the ball actually tries to throw it so the dude with the bat can’t hit it. I’m not kidding, we’re talking 6 foot 7 farm-hand looking goliaths chucking a leather ball 98mph about a foot from your head. Randy Johnson once sent a DOVE to the shadow realm with a fastball, in what can only be described as an accidental metaphor for American foreign policy directed by a god who really digs Cannibal Holocaust.
2 – You can figure out which Caribbean countries were in the British Empire because they’re the only countries still stubborn enough to think cricket is a better game. Baseball is opposed to cricket in every form, it’s essentially a sort of anti-colonialist protest sport. The Star Spangled Banner itself, the song, came from the terraces of baseball stadia. Basically all the rest of Latin America, along with the Koreans, Taiwanese and the Japanese are all very much on board with the baseball thing. Shohei Ohtani is one of the greatest sportsmen of our generation with a contract worth the GDP of many of those aforementioned countries, and most Europeans don’t even know who he is.
3 – Baseball writing is fricking great.
4 – That’s all, we can talk about film now.
Bois On Film
Even the first ever video in his Pretty Good series carries the main hallmarks of what would become his style. The insanely effective introduction feeds us some kind of beautiful, warm, up-tempo calypso jazz as Bois’s direction takes us flying above and through Google Earth’s New York City, setting a cozy mood and delivering a sense of profundity to what is essentially a credit sequence. Another key Bois element is the use of data and graphs, often rendered in 3D virtual space with a swinging animated camera to add effect to the data in order to tell a story, or a compelling series of stories. In order to understand Jon Bois as a creator, the threads are all here.
As non-Americans, we are unfortunately unaware of the brilliance of baseball writing. Not just on a day-to-day sportscasting kind of level, but in terms of historical baseball books, philosophical baseball books, economic baseball books, the level of excellence in writing is hard to even get across. At his heart, Bois is essentially an extension of the avant-garde sector of sports-writing which found its home most regularly in the baseball sector. One of the trail blazers in the 2010’s was Sam Miller, who wrote a sort of op-ed style series in Baseball Prospectus, called ‘Pebble Hunting’. In these articles, Miller would essentially take a look at some rogue tangential strange element of the sport, and then go about making sense of it in both a statistical and intuitive way.
In my favourite Sam Miller piece, Clayton Kershaw and the Fan in Black, the subject is just a guy in the front row, behind home plate.
For unimportant baseball reasons, the game itself was very important and historical, and many people online had noticed this one guy with the best seat in the house (which undoubtedly cost thousands of dollars), and spent a lot of the game on his phone. Naturally, this provoked much anger from the hordes of fans ironically watching him instead of the game. To the average baseball fan this is a pretty simple equation, it’s about how much one ‘deserves’ something compared to how much someone ‘appreciates’ something. To this end, the writer does what any great baseball writer would do and immediately creates a methodology to measure how many pitches the guy saw, didn’t see, was on his phone for, or actively reacted to.
This is a pretty impressive (obsessive) amount of effort, but it’s the next turn which sets Sam Miller apart and points to the kind of thing Bois would do when he picked up the mantel and changed the media of his sports writing into video form, as per the demands of Vox, the parent company of SBNation, now Secret Base. The article strikes out of the usual bounds of sports journalism and starts to directly ask questions about the meaning of sports in themselves, and ends up not so much confirming the negative hypothesis of the idea, but completely rejecting itself for its own reasons, breaking outside sort of hegemonic force of ‘fandom’ which so permeates our culture today, even in politics. Let the dude be on his phone if he wants, who even cares? Baseball isn’t even particularly interesting and it’s not like the guy knew it would be a special game at the start of it, and besides, envy is a sin!
The tradition of using storytelling to make mythology out of data is a long running tradition in baseball. What Moneyball presents as a clash between data people and stats people was mostly accurate, but it ignores the fact that much of the pushback from the older crowd towards advanced analytics was that these mathematicians had the cheek to tell those old dudes that THEIR NUMBERS SUCKED! Those old dudes loved the numbers just the way they were. This new wave of writers was skilled and knowledgeable statistically, but they sought that special sauce of sport so much they were willing to go completely off-piste just to gain a different perspective on how these minor events fit into the wider world.
The best way of describing Jon Bois is a kind of mix of this avant-garde sports writing, Adam Curtis’s storytelling and linking, and a unique style in visuals as well as sound. As time goes on, this style of writing will go extinct. Baseball writers still exist, they still write on Fangraphs and personal Substacks, but where the changing media landscape drowned an industry, Jon Bois had a raft in the video medium. So, when these awards come around, I do understand why people find him so hard to pin down to a medium or genre. I think it’s pretty simple, though, I think these things are more like visual articles, as opposed to a video essay.
So yeah, go check out some Jon Bois stuff, you won’t regret it. Even if you don’t have the stomach for sports, the trilogy of episodes of Pretty Good which covered Perot’s Reform Party were also great. If you do magically like baseball now, check out Sam Miller and his substack too, if you want to experience some of this writing before gambling advertising forces quality sports journalism out of existence for all time. To steal a review from the blog nohighball, it’s pretty good too.