Season's first day brings fresh hope

Randy Adamack watched his first opening day from the press box of the old Cleveland Stadium in 1974. He hasn't missed the beginning of a baseball season since — 34 and counting after the Mariners beat the Oakland Athletics on Monday.

The players come and go and eventually retire, the teams win and lose, managers sit on thrones or hot seats. Everything changes — except opening day and all the meaning that's attached to it.

"Deep down inside, you always hope this is the year," said Adamack, the Mariners' vice president of communications. "That's what opening day is about: hope. You've got 162 games to watch, but that first one is always different. There is so much history in baseball. It's much more of an event than in other sports."

The grass always gets to Adamack. There's something about walking through the tunnel and stealing a glance at a field manicured like a really cool checkerboard.

The ceremonial run around the bases always gets him, too. The Mariners started that when they opened Safeco Field, and something about watching that first trot sparked them into starting a tradition.

All these years — and 34 opening days — later, the feeling never changes. The first game of every baseball season bounces butterflies around his stomach.

"It's spring," he said. "It's opening day. And it's special."

Adamack grew up 65 miles from Cleveland, obsessed with the local baseball team. In college at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, he realized he wasn't going to play pro baseball — "primarily because of lack of talent" — so he decided to work for a professional baseball team.

The Indians hired him as an intern in 1974, something of a dream job, which is how Adamack found himself escorting the national anthem singer onto the field. Her name was Juanita Gamble, wife of Oscar Gamble, notable because Adamack can still remember the owner of possibly the largest afro in baseball history.

The next season, the Indians promoted Adamack to public-relations director, which is how he found himself watching history. Frank Robinson became the first black manager in baseball that season. On that cold and clear opening day, there were 56,000 or so people in the stands. Robinson, then a player-manager, smacked a home run in his first at-bat. The Indians debuted hideous all-red uniforms. They won.

"Just classic," Adamack said. "It was almost surreal, a storybook situation."

Also classic: On opening day in 1982, a few years after Adamack took a job with the Mariners, the team added a golf cart with a tugboat attached to the top to bring relief pitchers from the bullpen to the mound.

Well, somebody parked the darn thing on the foul line near the bullpen. The game was starting, and the umpires were standing with hands on hips, and the cart didn't have a key. Turns out reliever Bill Caudill had it hidden in his pocket.

On opening day in 1986, Adamack watched Jim Presley belt the game-tying home run in the ninth inning and the game-winning home run, a grand slam no less, in the 10th.

On the first opening day at Safeco Field, in 2000, after all those openers under the Kingdome roof, Adamack looked into the sky. He saw a plane flying overhead, heard trains rumble by, wowed again by another opening-day spectacle.

"Any single baseball game is misleading," Adamack said. "The thing about it is, it just feels good. It feels better when you win on opening day. You feel the possibilities."

That's what opening day is all about.

Greg Bishop: 206-464-3191 or gbishop@seattletimes.com