One of the country’s highest-stakes Senate races has suddenly collided with one of the most animating topics in New England: the Boston Red Sox.
In a move that appeared to be part stunt, part troll and part tugging on the heartstrings of the region’s die-hard sports fans, Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, aired a commercial during a Red Sox game blaming the team’s ownership for its woes. The network that carried the game — and is owned by the team — stopped showing the ad again partway through the broadcast, according to the Platner campaign.
And Mr. Platner was only too eager to promote their decision.
“Yesterday we started running this ad during the Red Sox game,” Mr. Platner wrote Saturday on social media, reposting video of the commercial, in which he is critical of private equity and claims it “destroyed our favorite baseball team.” He added: “Midway through the game the ad was taken down by the station.”
New England Sports Network, which is owned by the Red Sox and the Boston Bruins professional hockey team, confirmed the removal of the commercial.
“NESN removes advertisements when credible concerns arise regarding the use of intellectual property,” the network said in a statement Saturday. “The advertisement in question was removed because the creative included unauthorized use of third-party intellectual property and did not comply with NESN’s advertising standards.”
The network did not directly address a follow-up inquiry about what specific intellectual property it was referring to. A spokesperson for the Red Sox did not have any immediate comment.
Mr. Platner is challenging Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, in a race that is at the center of the fight for Senate control. He is expected to be the Democratic nominee, following the exit from the primary of Gov. Janet Mills, who ended her campaign after trailing Mr. Platner in the polls for months.
At least one prominent Red Sox fan who has been critical of team ownership was not impressed by Mr. Platner’s pitch.
On Saturday, Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, which has a popular website, shared a screenshot on social media of an email exchange he had ahead of Friday’s game with a consultant for Mr. Platner’s campaign. In the exchange, the consultant asked Mr. Portnoy if he would be interested in speaking with Mr. Platner about the themes of the ad, which he said highlighted the candidate’s “populist streak.” NESN might not even want to run it, he added.
Mr. Portnoy replied in sharp language that he would not, in fact, be interested in such a discussion, but would be open to talking to him about a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol that Mr. Platner said he covered up after learning of its associations.
The Platner campaign confirmed the exchange but declined to comment further.
In a statement, the Collins campaign accused Mr. Platner of trying to “change the subject” from his record, which it said “can’t erase questions about his judgment and character.”
NESN’s decision to pull the commercial was unusual, said Gigi Sohn, a former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission, but not completely surprising.
“At the end of the day,” Ms. Sohn said, cable networks like NESN “don’t want to lose viewers, and they don’t want to lose subscribers.”
Since NESN is a cable network, it is not beholden to the same requirements as broadcast channels for granting federal candidates airtime. Though claiming intellectual-property violations “is often used legitimately,” Ms. Sohn added, “it’s often used as a smoke screen for copyright holders to not carry or to censor content they don’t like.”
While it was not clear how much Mr. Platner’s campaign spent to air the ad Friday, data from AdImpact show that the campaign invested about $14,000 on airtime with NESN from last Tuesday through Monday, a relatively small sum for campaign ad buys.
The ad from Mr. Platner’s campaign refers to an Axios article from March 2021 about an agreement in which the private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners acquired an 11 percent ownership stake of the Red Sox. Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Red Sox, says on its website that the firm made a “significant investment into FSG” at that time “as part of an ongoing strategic alliance between the two companies.”
The Red Sox, which have an avid following in New England, were in last place in the American League East on Sunday evening. Fans have voiced frustration, with some chanting, “Sell the team!” during home games this season.
In the ad, Mr. Platner suggests that private equity has been “stripping” the team “for parts.” He goes on to say that private equity is “buying up our homes, our sports and our lives.” Images of what appear to be Fenway Park, where the Red Sox play, along with a house and people with troubled facial expressions flash in the background as ominous music plays.
“I will reverse the private equity curse,” Mr. Platner adds, cheekily ending the commercial with a longing nod to a former Red Sox star, and current Los Angeles Dodgers player, Mookie Betts.
