Twins star wants fans to celebrate with him

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Listen up: Byron Buxton would like to ask a favor of all of you in the stands.

Whenever he homers or changes the game in a big moment -- of which there have been plenty this season -- take a look into the Twins’ dugout and see what they’re doing. It shouldn’t be too tough to find Nick Gordon, since he’ll be standing at the top rail of the dugout with his right arm in the air doing the “trucker salute” -- pumping his arm up and down like a child would to signal a truck driver to honk their horn.

Buxton and Gordon want you to do that with them.

“Me and Buck, it's been something that we've been doing for a while,” Gordon said. “I started really standing up and doing it in the dugout. People were picking up on it. The goal is to have the whole stadium doing it. That's what we need. We need the whole stadium on it.”

Throughout Byron’s life, his father, Felton Buxton II, has been a truck driver. Byron knew exactly what time his dad was scheduled to pull onto their street. After he’d hop off his school bus, he would hurriedly fling his backpack into the house, run back outside and sit on the dirt road, knowing his father would be about 15 minutes behind him.

He’d sit and wait patiently. Eventually, he would hear the rumbles and groans of the big truck before he would see it turn onto their road. And he’d sit there, grin on his face, pumping his arm up and down in the air for his dad, waiting for Felton to sound the horn.

As Byron Buxton now experiences all of this success on the baseball field, he can’t help but think back to that simple fun of his youth. That’s when he’s at his best -- when he just takes the field wearing the Minnesota jersey, mind clear, ready to cast aside everything else and just have that kind of childlike fun with his teammates, playing the kids’ game that he loves. This gesture still connects him to that dirt road and that booming sound from two decades ago.

Buxton had joked about the celebration to his teammates earlier this year, and they encouraged him to bring it to the field. Eventually, he told them he’d blow the horn after his next big fly. He did. Everyone liked it. It stuck, spreading around the dugout with Gordon leading the charge.

“For me, that’s like the kid in me,” Buxton said. “It’s something fun that when you’re little, you didn’t really think about the results. It was more about you going out there having fun. It’s just kind of something that, for me, it’s like a childhood thing that brings a little bit more fun to the game for me.”

Buxton’s raw, unbridled joy for the game has been more apparent than ever in those big moments this season. He’ll yell into the air. He’ll jump for joy on the basepaths. He’ll gesture and grin at his teammates. He wants fans to join him in those celebrations, too -- and this is how he’ll know they’re sharing those emotions with him.

“We’ll get Minnesota into it one of these days,” Buxton said. “It’s going to be my little thing, now. So, just something to have a little bit more fun with the fans, as well. It’s hard to do that, celebration-wise, so it’s easy for them to kind of do a horn. It’s something fun.”