Inside baseball on ‘Truck Day’ haul
BOSTON, Mass. — Never mind the fact that you’re still ponying up for winter diesel and shoveling snow off your trailers. And who really cares what that diva rodent Wiarton Whatsisface had to say about our weather?
Spring is just around the curve, and the reason we at todaystrucking.com know that is because baseball season is almost here. And no one is better prepared than those rabid fans in Boston, who just celebrated Truck Day.
Truck Day, in case you didn’t know, comes a few days before the opening of the Boston Red Sox’s Spring Training Camp. (This year, Truck Day was Friday, Feb.12.)
You can check out what it looks like right here. (Never before has a trucker picked up a load with so much fanfare).
On Truck Day, the BoSox load up everything they need for spring training — gloves, exercise equipment, a box full of eerie-looking animal bone used for hardening the surface of bats (honest!) into a New England Moving & Storage/Atlas Van Lines trailer.
to parade after the season too.
The trailer is then coupled to a Freightliner and hauled to Palm Parks, Fla., where the athletic descendants of the legendary Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski take to the fields in preparation of the 2010 season.
But not before the truck is driven slowly through the streets of Beantown lined with several hundred (or maybe several tens) BoSox fans, hoping to bless the equipment for a good season.
"To a New Englander, Truck Day is like Saint Peter waving our hopes through his pearly gates to a metaphoric journey from cold city streets to verdant pastures under a Florida sun," writes Bob Elkstrom, a regular contributor to the Boston baseball blog Boston Dirt Dogs.
For the past 10 years, New England driver Al Hartz has piloted the Truck Day Freightliner, earning a bit of celebrity status for himself. Evidently he knows he’s a star.
"Like that’s all he needs," laughed New England Moving & Storage President Jeanine Kelly-Coburn when todaystrucking.com called to have a few words with the driver, "more attention from his fans."
Kelly-Coburn promised she’ll have him call us soon as he gets home later this week.
Baseball insiders say other cities with professional baseball teams are eyeing Truck Days of their own.
Guess that rules out Toronto. Ouch.
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