Legendary third baseman Wade Boggs has teamed up with the Pabst Brewing Company for a new ad campaign that Anheuser-Busch could learn a thing or two about.
The ad features the slugger demanding to know the truth about the company’s retro mascot Cool Blue, which the five-time batting champion claims is and always was him.
In a mysterious documentary-style three-minute video that dropped on YouTube Tuesday, Boggs said he would get his justice.
In the gritty but hilarious ad, Boggs recalled entering a bar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — where Pabst is headquartered — and seeing a cardboard cutout of Cool Blue.
“I looked at it and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is me,’” he said.
The Hall of Famer said he informed a bartender that there was a life-size cutout of him in the joint, but he was told it was not him, but a mascot.
“I said, ‘Cool Blue? No, That is Wade Boggs,” Boggs said in the video.
Boggs said he set out to prove he was indeed Cool Blue and that what he discovered during his four-decade investigation shook him to his “core.”
“The numbers don’t lie,” he said in the video. “That year I went 18 for 44 against Milwaukee. Pabst Blue Ribbon was founded in 1844.”
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Boggs continued, “Twelve-ounce PBR — 12-time All-Star. Over my career in Boston, I had 47 triples — Pabst Blue Ribbon alcohol content is 4.7.”
“It’s me. Cool Blue is Wade Boggs,” the former baseball player concluded in the beer ad.
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The ad also featured a Pabst executive sitting in his office who complained the company has spent 40 years ignoring the former World Series champ’s ludicrous claims.
Pabst, which is sponsoring the #BoggsIsBlue campaign, shared a snippet of the ad on Twitter:
ADMIT THE TRUTH #hacked #boggsisblue pic.twitter.com/ApY7l11lCw
— Pabst Blue Ribbon (@PabstBlueRibbon) April 18, 2023
The full, three-minute ad might introduce PBR to people who might not know about the iconic brand or have simply forgotten it existed.
The video could also introduce a non-divisive baseball legend to a new generation of fans while also making money.
It’s a win/win situation.
Boggs, now 64, is known as much for hitting 118 career home runs as he was for slugging beers, anyway.
Legend has it — and this was covered in a 2015 episode of the FXX sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” — Boggs drank anywhere between 50 and 107 beers on a cross-country flight when he was with the Boston Red Sox.
The story as it was portrayed in “It’s Always Sunny,” which featured Boggs in a cameo, concluded he crushed it against the Seattle Mariners on the following day.
No one knows how much of the story is true.
How much of the urban legend is fact or fiction is irrelevant. The point is, Boggs is an American icon in the same way PBR is and Bud Light was.
Rather than partner up with a transgender social media influencer such as Dylan Mulvaney — which Bud Light did — Pabst enlisted a beloved athlete for a fun campaign to do what a company in its position is supposed to do — which is selling its product.
The “woke” marketing team that has run Anheuser-Busch’s reputation into the ground, and people who think just like them, should take notice.
