Office Supplies...Playball!!

Every business has its office supplies; pens, paper clips, legal pads. Shopping lists vary amongst different professions. For a major league baseball team, along with the laptops, copiers and staplers, their supply lists include batting helmets, free weights and ace bandages. Every year, on an early February morning an eighteen wheeler pulls onto Yawkey Way in the Fenway, and is packed tight, filled with the business of baseball. Throughout the day hand trucks stacked with boxes are wheeled up the ramp of the trailer. Young, strong men carry heavy, awkward shaped pieces by hand as more senior members of the crew, familiar with the elaborate puzzle, direct placement.

Newspaper photographers snap pictures of the days work hoping for a shot revealing a recognizable piece of baseball accoutrement. Television crews frame their reporters with the truck just over their shoulder. Ground hogs be damned. Weeks before the first day of spring, the press is here to report on the unofficial beginning of summer. For this truck is heading for the sunshine of Fort Myers, Florida, the home for the Boston Red Sox spring training.

It’s now o.k. to exhale, to speak about baseball without feeling like a Christmas tree in July. It is now o.k. to speak of the possibilities, to debate the acquisitions, to forage for tickets and make summer travel plans. And though it will be almost two months before a single pitch is thrown in anger discussions of whom should be batting in the number two hole are already heating up.

The truck is packed. The press is now positioning itself for the shot, the picture that defines the beginning. A small crowd of loyal, probably unemployed, fans have gathered waiting to cheer the moment.

The eighteen wheeler begins to pull away. It is ten degrees, snow is falling, and a crowd of people have gathered to cheer a truck filled with office supplies. This is baseball in Boston. PLAY BALL!!

dg