For this team, it's always moving experience

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- On a 53-foot Atlas Van Lines truck packed with 4,200 cubic feet of Red Sox stuff, including Theo Epstein's guitar, a big rig Al Hartz navigated through rain coming down sideways in South Carolina while his radio blared about a tornado watch in towns he had no idea were ahead of him or not, Joe Cochran sent down a single suitcase.

Serve as the Sox equipment manager for as long as the 44-year-old Cochran has, you learn how to pack.

"Dry cleaning?" Cochran said, while supervising the unloading of the truck yesterday morning. "I can do showers to de-wrinkle stuff in any hotel room in the league. You just can't forget about it. We had a player a few years ago, I went out to dinner with Mike Stanley in Kansas City. We got back to his room, and another player who was staying in the room above Stanley had de-steamed his clothes, went to dinner, but left his shower running. The water was running down into Stano's room."

Outside of Truckin' Times, maybe, or highwaySTAR, it's hard to find a truck accorded more celebrity status than the one that carries the materials the Sox need to survive six weeks of spring training here. These days, the Sox truck even gets its own parade.

Hartz left Boston at 3 p.m. Monday, was south of D.C. that night, advanced despite the tornado scare to the Georgia-Florida border the next night, and pulled into the City of Palms Park parking lot at 2 o'clock Wednesday afternoon.

The guys who load and unload all that stuff -- computers and treadmills and boxes of uniforms and training shorts and golf clubs and bicycles and strollers (the 1,200 dozen baseballs the Sox go through in camp, those are shipped ahead)? For them, it's a good day if nothing has been left behind.

"It's like running a restaurant -- if the meal's bad, you don't want to hear about it," Cochran said. "Hopefully, everything gets there and nothing gets broken."

That's not a one-way proposition. There's the return trip, too, when the Sox require two vans to haul everything back, most of it the possessions of the players and their families preparing to settle into Boston for the summer. One year, a suitcase belonging to Ivan Calderon vanished. "We got a call from Budget in the middle of July," Cochran said. "Someone opened the trunk of a car. There was the bag."

Worse was the time the Sox flew to Atlanta for exhibitions before opening the season, and John Burkett discovered his suitcase missing. Cochran called Hartz, the driver from Framingham, Mass., who has been toting the Sox' stuff for 10 years. Hartz remembered that someone had taken Burkett's bag and stuck it on the truck headed to Boston.

Hartz made a detour to Atlanta, where Cochran was waiting at a loading dock at the ballpark. All through batting practice and then during the game, they pulled stuff off the truck until they found Burkett's bag. "Burkett wouldn't have cared -- he would have worn the same clothes every day of the trip if he had to," Cochran said. "It was more about us. We screwed up. We were going to make it right.

"But overall," Cochran said, "we have a pretty good track record."

Cochran was a 20-year-old from South Yarmouth, Mass., tooling aimlessly around the Cape on his moped when a friend steered him to a spot on Joe Mooney's grounds crew in 1984. That led to a job first as the visiting clubhouse manager in 1990, and the home clubhouse gig two years later.

He has a lot more help now than he did in 1993, the first year the Sox trained here, when he and Tom McLaughlin, the visiting clubhouse manager, unloaded the truck themselves. For their first two weeks here, the Sox had no laundry facilities, either.

"Jack Rogers, the traveling secretary, gave us rolls of quarters," Cochran said, "and Tommy would go to a laundromat every night. Imagine the looks he got, carrying in all those red socks and jocks."

McLaughlin, who used to work part time as a construction worker, is from Brighton, Mass. "God's country," he said.

His first job with the club came when he was 18, and his brother-in-law, who worked for the club, set him up as the visiting bat boy. That was in 1986, the year the Mets beat the Red Sox in the World Series. "Every time Lee Mazzilli comes to town," McLaughlin said, invoking the name of one former Met, "he says, 'Thanks, Mac,' and shows me his Series ring."

The charm McLaughlin uses to win over visiting players worked wonders with the women who ran the laundromat.

"By the end of the week," he said, "they were watching my laundry for me."

That first year here was not only about dirty clothes, but dirt, too. The Sox shipped barrels of clay so Mooney and his grounds crew could build the mound and touch up the infield of the new ballpark.

But it was also in Fort Myers that Cochran found a future assistant -- Edward "Pookie" Jackson, a kid from Jacksonville who got his nickname from his grandmother. Why Pookie? "I don't know," he said. "Because I had a cousin named Nookie?"

Pookie used to sit beyond the outfield wall in Jacksonville, where the minor league Suns play, retrieve balls hit over the fence, and sell them to the owner of the team for 50 cents apiece. One day, the team's bat boy didn't show up. They asked Pookie if he'd fill in. "The bat boy didn't show up the second night, either," Jackson said. "It never stopped."

Jackson was 13. He took the job with the Sox at 18, and was assigned to the team's Single A team in Utica, N.Y. That was before Cochran decided he needed him in Boston, where Pookie's talents extend well beyond the duties of a clubhouse man. "[Former manager] Jimy Williams used to say in the meeting to kick off spring training, 'If you need a loan, see Edward,' " Cochran said.

Jackson carries cash in his deep pockets. Oftentimes, the players ask him to hold theirs for him. You could say he's a walking . . . "ATM," he added, helpfully.

Andrew Crosby, who used to be part of the crew, didn't come back this season. He's in the Boston Police Academy, his place taken by a rookie, Jared Pinkos. Kenyatta Gomez, who had hoped to play college football, signed on to what he thought would be a summer job. That was in 1994, the year before he graduated from Brookline High. He's still here, splitting time between the Sox and his other job as a freelancer in TV and film production, but he's fourth on the list to become a firefighter in Brookline.

Dean Lewis? His twin brother, Dan, called the Sox looking for a job when he was 14 and was told to call back when he was 16. He called back on his birthday, was hired, and a day later Dean was hired, too, a couple of high school sophomores from Lincoln-Sudbury living their dream. Dean Lewis is still living it -- he rubs up the new baseballs in Delaware River mud -- even though that meant moonlighting for years on top of his day job as an insurance man. There were nights when the Sox came back from a road trip and Lewis was in the clubhouse unpacking till dawn, before he'd shower, change, and head to the office. He's been here the longest, since 1980, and added spring training to his résumé last year, after the insurance company laid him off.

He comes back for the same reason as John Coyne, the Needham, Mass., native and former student manager for the Boston College football team who seamlessly made the transition from one sport to the other eight years ago.

"I love being around the ballpark," Coyne said. "I love getting up and going to work."

Gordon Edes can be reached at edes@globe.com.