- Drove for several MLB teams in Clearwater FL
- Safety is paramount when teams travel via bus on the somewhat busy Florida roads
It’s rich Baxter from baseball talkradio.com and the baseball talk radio show and I’ve found a uh – a driver here in Florida on spring training you know never know who you’re going to bump into here in uh Florida around spring training.
There’s famous people all over the place, and this gentleman was actually a bus driver for many teams for 10 years on the road here in Florida, spring training.
Q: And uh, John, how are you?
A: I’m Thank you. and uh you cared around the Red Sox, the Phillies, the Yankees, all these teams that are on the east coast, um, of course, a couple of them left uh and went out west. I missed those teams. The Dodgers.
Rich: I was staying in Vero Beach the other day. did you ever cart the Dodgers around? John carted these teams around in a bus that he was the bus driver
John: Unfortunately not, had the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Phillies, the local teams here (near Clearwater / Tampa) for spring training.
Rich: Nice, nice. so, the Dodgers are out in Arizona, as I said, they just won the first game of the Tokyo series over in Japan, to lead off the 2025 season. And John, who’s your favorite team that you’ve carted around or driven around? I keep saying carted around. I don’t know why, but um did you just drive or did you have to load the luggage? What did you have to do?
John: No, our responsibility is just driving them safely getting comfortably and safely to their destinations. The managers were the ones who loaded everything. I assisted them as far as location.
Rich: Nice, That’s cool. sometimes truck drivers have to load their their loads when they get there. and then other companies provide, you know, forklifts and things like that, but it was nice that the managers or, you know, the locker room managers loaded that all their equipment onto the board onto the bus. Yeah, so John had the the ‘hard’ job I’m gonna put that in air quotes. Lol…
You know, people would probably die to be a bus driver for a baseball team. That was a great job, John. How did you get the job, by the way?
John: Well, when I was driving limos prior to going to another company, uh they assigned me to the Yankees. and that’s how I guess our the Yankees primarily driving those. end up driving the team.
Rich: The Vaunted Yankees, the World Series champion, they’ve won the most World Series titles in baseball, the New York Yankees, but this year, they can wear a beard. I it’s sacrilegious to me. It’s sacrilegious. It is to me too, because I was with them in the early days when they had the high standards of you know, no facial hair and so forth, always clean ….God.
Yeah, and they always looked clean and you said, you know, you can’t imagine Aaron Judge with a beard. I can’t imagine what a fu-man chew or something like that. It just it’s against the grain. It’s like things are happening suddenly that you never thought would ever happen, even in the game of baseball, but John, thanks for talking to me taking a few minutes out of your day here. I know you’re busy. And uh Phillies, uh you even drove the Phillies around. Any Phillies memories before we go?
John: Not really said the Yankees were my primary team that I would drive around..
Rich: Thank you for talking to me, John. Take care. Thank you
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