Red Sox Opening Day TV Ads Range From Pence To Pink
By Matt McDonald | July 25, 2020, 8:36 EDT
Boston Red Sox viewers watching the Opening Day broadcast on New England Sports Network were shown an ad featuring Vice President Mike Pence and two ads featuring homosexuality-affirming messages.
Pence was the most prominent figure in an ad designed to aid the re-election campaign of President Donald Trump (and Pence). A group called America First Policies, a 501(c)(4) organization that supports Trump’s policies, produced the ad, called “America Back To Work,” which features a clip of Pence giving a speech June 12 about the country’s recovery from coronavirus. The ad only briefly shows an image of President Trump, signing a trade deal.
“The great American comeback has begun,” Pence says in the ad, as if referring not only to the economy but also to the president’s re-election efforts.
The Trump campaign is hoping to flip New Hampshire (where Trump lost by about 3,000 votes in 2016) and to keep central and northern Maine (where Trump won a single electoral vote in 2016, by winning the state’s Second Congressional District).
Pence is a conservative Republican who often draws the ire of homosexuality-affirming activists because of his past opposition to offering homosexuals explicit protections in law based on their sexual orientation.
At the other end of the spectrum, a Berkshire Bank ad also aired during the game Friday, July 24 featuring a series of wallets, including three showing the colors of the Rainbow Flag, plus a reference to serving a wallet “whether it’s thick or thin, whether it’s loud or proud” while displaying a rainbow-colored wallet prominently.
A Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts ad ostensibly about tele-health features a female couple holding each other and then smiling at a young boy who appears from behind them and runs around them. The two women look longingly into each other’s eyes, and then later play a hands game with the little boy. Toward the end of the ad the boy is held by both women, with the boy in the middle, as if portraying a family scene.
This is the first year since 2013 that the Red Sox have not held a Pride Night in June at Fenway Park, because the team did not play in June because of the coronavirus emergency.
The social statements made by the left-leaning Red Sox organization during the game Opening Day centered on Black Lives Matter. The team has a 254-foot-long Black Lives Matter banner on a billboard near the park facing the Massachusetts Turnpike and a 100-foot long Black Lives Matter banner in the center field bleachers.
Before every pitch, viewers watching the game on New England Sports Network (which Fenway Sports Group, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, owns 80 percent of) saw the initials BLM and a black Major League Baseball logo on the back slope of the pitcher’s mound, which the Red Sox said was stenciled onto the mound but appeared on television to have been digitally added.
The principal owner of Fenway Sports Group is John Henry, who also owns The Boston Globe.