NEW YORK—Featuring various clips from past playoff games and what appears to be an abandoned slaughterhouse, a disturbing new MLB postseason commercial that began airing Friday claims October is when the maggots feast on rotting pig flesh. “October: when the best in baseball go head-to-head, when true champions rise above, when worms gorge themselves on befouled meat of the filthy swine,” the commercial’s narrator says as footage of Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner delivering a fastball and Cubs slugger Kris Bryant sliding into home plate slowly fade to a close-up of larvae infesting a dead pig’s exposed entrails and horseflies swarming the eyeball of a decomposing boar carcass. “The maggots will bloat as they feed, pulsating in a symphony of decay and ruin. A corrosive stench will burn the air and poison the lungs. And when the pig blood is drained and the vermin scatter, Earth will reclaim the naked, desiccated bones. This is October.” The ad then concludes with the narrator instructing viewers to “Catch the postseason on Fox and TBS” as the MLB logo is superimposed over a pile of severed pig heads.

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