A video encouraging San Francisco Giants fans to buy tickets for this week’s series against the San Diego Padres also included an NSFW message in the opening moment of the social media ad.
In the promotional Facebook reel, the top portion of the letter F in the Giants’ “SF” logo had “F—k the Padres” written in a slightly darker orange font, making it just barely visible in the opening frames of the 15-second video. The message disappears within a second as the SF logo moves back in the frame before the rest of the advertisement plays.
The video with the curse word, which was flagged to SFGATE by a reader who had it fed organically into their timeline on Tuesday, is visible on mobile devices and some desktops. (We found it is visible on PCs but not on most Mac computers.) It’s also visible in the preview image when the link is sent in a text message.
The Giants published the video to Facebook on Thursday, April 30 — the same day the team ended up losing both ends of a doubleheader in walk-off fashion in Philadelphia. According to the video’s metrics, it’s been viewed over 13,000 times since then, though there isn’t any trace of the advertisement on the main Facebook page for the team.
The Giants did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment about the video by the time of publication.
It’s been a tough start to the season for the Giants so far, with a winless road trip last week dropping the team into last place in the NL West. They did, however, manage to beat the Padres 3-2 on Monday night. The second game of the three-game series against San Diego is set for Tuesday at 6:45 p.m.