Tuesday, February 09, 2010
TRUCK DAY!
It’s Truck Day! The equipment truck is leaving for Port St. Lucie! Pitchers and catchers report in 9 days!
It’s so exciting, isn’t it? I just LOVE truck day. I love the live video feed on mets.com of Mr. Met helping pack the truck. I love watching the photo ops of the players who haven’t left yet, pretending to help pack the truck. It’s awesome that they let the kids from Harlem RBI and the Girls & Boys Club come and help pack the truck too, it’s a great event for them. I appreciate that WFAN is broadcasting live from Citi Field and that there’s a discount at the team store and free coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts for any fans who want to stop by and watch. I think the giveaways of those promotional Opening Day t-shirts is a fantastic thing. So many teams make a great, fun event around Truck Day, I’m so glad the Mets are one of them. It really breaks up the monotony of the winter and gets people thinking about baseball.
Of course, none of the above is true (before you go running out to Willets Point). I made it all up on the spot without thinking about it too much. I’m not claiming any originality, I’m just mimicking what I see other teams all over MLB do on Truck Day.
The point is, if I can do this without thinking, and without being any kind of sports marketing professional, why don’t the Mets? It’s a missed opportunity of putting something positive out there. It’s missed opportunity to create fan and community goodwill.
It is, of course, business as usual.
What did we get? A blurry photo of Mr. Met falling out of a Uhaul posted to MetsBlog.
But I’m still excited, and now I’m regretting that I don’t have a Spring Training trip planned. Baseball! It’s almost back again!
Truck Day is an exciting day. Maybe next year we get to follow Mr. Met’s twitter feed or a blog from the road.
But the only thing more exciting for me (in the realm of Spring Training) than seeing the Mets’ equipment truck head down to Port St. Lucie is the day each year that I do the same.