Bizarre Tom Brady baseball ad includes Eli Manning in full SF Giants uniform

The sports apparel brand Fanatics and its various subsidiary brands like Topps and Mitchell & Ness have made Tuesday “Tom Brady Day,” because it is Dec. 12 and Brady’s number was 12. 

The bizarre marketing stunt includes an entire fabricated reality in which Brady stuck with baseball. Brady played baseball in addition to football in high school, and impressed enough to be drafted by the Montreal Expos in 1995. But rather than sign for Montreal and head to the minors, he went to play quarterback at Michigan and eventually had a Hall of Fame-worthy NFL career. So, in honor of the 12/12 date, Fanatics unveiled a line of Brady items including an exclusive baseball card from a set released on Tuesday (reportedly, only 162 Brady cards were made, with 81 of those autographed by Brady) and a limited-edition Brady Montreal jersey, imagining what would have happened had the Bay Area native stuck with baseball.

In a video posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, Brady’s alternate reality baseball career is highlighted in a Montreal bar, with three former Expos — Pedro Martínez, Larry Walker and Vladimir Guerrero Sr. — watching a retired-from-MLB Brady’s ad for his car dealership. The clip makes it seem like Brady kept the Expos from moving to Washington, D.C., which the real Expos did in 2005.

But the alternate reality did keep one negative aspect of his career: Brady’s two losses to the Giants. Only this time, those Giants are from San Francisco. In the ad, Martinez rues the loss to the Giants, with Guerrero chiming in to say, “Twice.” Adding to the surrealism was a video former New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning posted Tuesday morning, in which he’s donning a San Francisco Giants jersey and hat.

“Man, what a run you had. Twenty-three years, seven world championships, multiple MVPs. You’re a Montreal legend,” Manning said. “Personally, my favorite were those Giants championships. You’ve got a special place in the hearts of all of us from San Francisco,” he adds, while flashing two distinct SF Giants championship rings.

Topps also shared a photo of David Tyree, famous for the helmet catch that helped the New York (football) Giants beat Brady’s Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, wearing a San Francisco Giants jersey and leaping over the center field wall to make a home run-saving hat catch. Tyree’s backdrop appears to look like Oracle Park, but pretty much everything behind Tyree feels off from Oracle Park’s actual right-center look.

That photo isn’t as bad as some of the other logical fallacies with this whole alternate-reality scenario, including the most glaring one to a baseball fan: How would Brady have lost to the Giants twice in the World Series with the Expos? Both teams played in the National League, making any World Series matchup impossible.

But to say the absolute least, it’s a massive stretch to presume an 18th-round pick out of high school in 1995 was going to single-handedly save a franchise that MLB was trying to contract in the early 2000s. But is it a bigger stretch than dreaming up an entire ad campaign just to boost baseball card and jersey sales? Perhaps not.