Don’t Tread on Truck Day

Photo I took of "The" Truck on Truck Day in 2009

This Tuesday is one of my favorite days of the off-season.

It’s a silly, cold, tradition, yet still I love it and participate in it!

Truck Day is a joke to many.  Every year when I write about it I get messages from non-Sox fans mocking me (and the rest of us) for celebrating trucks packed with equipment pulling away from Fenway Park.  A good lot of the media, especially the Boston sports media, decry it for being overblown and, now, sponsored (although for years CVS has quietly sponsored it with a banner across the truck and no one seemed to complain about that).  Last year the sponsor was a bit more vocal with JetBlue giving out freebies and chances to win airline tickets.  JetBlue will once again sponsor Truck Day this year.  The local media loves to complain about the current ownership’s ability to make money off of anything. (Again and for the record, the fans didn’t have to pay anything at Truck Day last year.  We got free trucker’s caps, soft baseballs, foam fingers and the opportunity to win free tickets while we stood outside in the cold waiting for the vacuum cleaner to be loaded on to the truck.)

It’s harmless, silly fun.  Hell, one thing the media always seems to leave out in their stories on Truck Day is how there always appears to be more of THEM at Fenway than there are fans.  A small but dedicated (and, admittedly, slightly crazy) group of fans show up to watch the trucks roll away and mark the beginning of Spring Training and folks want to present it as something negative.  It isn’t.  It’s FUN.  That’s all.  Nothing else to see here.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, my butt (and the rest of me!) will be outside Fenway on Tuesday morning to see the trucks off and cheer the coming of Spring Training.  When that’s over, I’ll probably hit a bar to lift a glass to the Boys of Summer finally returning to us.

In two days…TWO DAYS we get our first real sign of baseball.  How can that not be a GOOD thing?