NESN recently aired video from the Boston Red Sox Winter Weekend in Springfield, MA. During the event, team owner John Henry and Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom sat down with Tom Caron to answer questions about the future of the franchise.
Raw video from the event has been floating around social media that shows that Henry received a lot of heckling and boos when he spoke. Most of it was edited out when the event aired on NESN. Tuesday morning on 98.5 The Sports Hub, Toucher & Rich played some of the real audio and edited audio side by side.
“If you’re asking if any of the boos were left in, sure they were! But it was a little bit of a pick-and-choosing when and who was talking when the boos were aired,” Rich Shertenlieb said.
He pointed out that the audio was manipulated more significantly when Henry spoke. More of the audience’s true reaction was preserved during Bloom’s responses. To illustrate this point, they played a clip that had audience backlash to John Henry saying that this past season was disappointing edited out completely while the boos for Bloom answering the same question were not manipulated at all.
Fred Toucher joked that the audio made it sound like the stage manager “had slides of Chaim Bloom pushing old ladies over” and must have shown the audience photos of “Chaim Bloom flipping off kids.”
“They did Chaim Bloom dirty,” Shertenlieb said. “They took out all the boos for John Henry and let in every single one of them for Chaim Bloom.”
Chad Finn of The Boston Globe reached out to NESN about the editing. They responded that the presentation was edited and the audio was manipulated but insisted that it was nothing nefarious or abnormal.
“The show tonight at 8p — as is always the case with television production,” the network responded, “we made tweaks where needed to accommodate sound quality in the unique amphitheater environment at MGM and condensing a 90-min period to the hour-long format of the show. With that said, the lion share of the ownership/front office Q&A is included in the show.”
Shertenlieb is not buying that explanation. He played raw audio of the audience booing and heckling John Henry when he said it was expensive to field a winning baseball team. That is why the team raises ticket prices. The NESN audio cut out the response to Henry and the team owner was not heard from again during the telecast.
“Either he talked and they edited it out or he just didn’t answer for the rest of it,” Shertenlieb said. “And they really did Chaim Bloom dirty, because when Chaim would speak they left in every single boo and they edited out the time when John Henry spoke and all those boos that we heard, where he got the worst response, were cut out.”
