Houston Rubs Padres’ Noses in Astrodome Rug : Despite Enthusiasm, San Diego Is Burned by the Astros in Season Opener

Ah, baseball’s season opener. Sweet green grass under a fresh spring day (or night). A special occasion.

Unfortunately for the Padres, they did not open their season in a real ballpark Tuesday. They were condemned to play on the Astrodome’s plastic grass under the plastic roof.

To be fair, the Astrodome was fitted with a marvelous new rug.

It has come to this . . .

A sign behind the batting cage: “Please wipe feet before walking on AstroTurf.”

Real baseball is played where tarps are spread to protect the grass during batting practice.

However, the National League schedule mandates that the Padres must play nine games a year here, and someone had to come to such a Godforsaken place to open the season. It may well be the penance for going 65-97 in 1987.

But that was last year. This is a new year, and that’s what a season opener is all about. It’s the spirit of the occasion rather than the occasion itself.

Mark Parent can attest to that. He was a party to his 10th opener Tuesday night, albeit the first nine were in hamlets such as Walla Walla, Reno, Salem, Amarillo, Beaumont and Las Vegas. After a baseball lifetime in such outposts, Houston seems like paradise . . . even indoors.

What impressed Parent was the spirit, especially among the veterans in the clubhouse.

“Guys like Garry Templeton and Keith Moreland were acting like it was their first Little League game,” said Parent, the 26-year-old backup to catcher Benito Santiago. “It was awesome, like everybody was about to play the first game of his life. Let’s start playing right now. Let’s play three.”

That was the spirit.

The atmosphere is just different, raised to a heightened electricity it won’t and can’t reach again until a command-performance showdown in the heat of a pennant race.

A forest of cameras cluttered the area behind the batting cage, presumably manned by folks who had wiped their feet.

Joan Kroc, fashionable rather than partisan in a blue suit, made a rare on-the-field appearance during batting practice.

“We have to win tonight,” she said. “We have to get off to a good start.”

Her fingers were whitened by tightly crossed fingers.

“I have butterflies,” she said.

Nerves. Everyone suffers from nerves on opening day, even if they don’t admit it.

But isn’t it really just another game over the marathon of a 162-game season?

“I never look at it as just another game,” Templeton said. “It’s a steppingstone you can build on for the season. If you play like you’re capable of playing, it sets the tone for what you can expect. If you win, hopefully it will carry over.”

What happened at the beginning of the 1987 season was certainly a harbinger of what was to come. The Padres lost the opener to the San Francisco Giants, 4-3, in 12 innings. The opener “carried over” to 4-3 and 2-1 losses in the next two games.

In fact, one-run losses were as devastating to the 1987 Padres as their 12-42 start, though the one-run losses and 12-42 start certainly went hand-in-hand. They were 19-34 in one-run games.

“It just seemed like we couldn’t win one-run games at the start of the season,” Templeton said. “Later in the year, the guys were a little looser and we started winning them. This year, we have to get off to a better start.”

That was the pregame mood. That was before the Padres skinned their knees on that infernal turf . . . or rather pitcher Ed Whitson bruised his hand because of that infernal turf.

He had breezed into the eighth inning, walking no one and throwing 75 pitches. What’s more, the Padres had a 3-1 lead against Mike Scott. Terry Puhl hit a comebacker to the mound, crisp but fieldable.

“It had downward spin off the turf,” Whitson said. “I had no chance to get a glove on it.”

It went off his hand and temporarily left him with no feeling in his thumb or index finger. He threw in the dirt to first base and Puhl was aboard, awarded a hit because of Whitson’s obvious hand injury. Whitson left the game, and Houston scored five runs before his successors could retire the side. The final score was 6-3.

“That was really tough to swallow,” Whitson said, “but it’s a long year and you’re always going to see stuff that’s never happened before. It happened to me tonight. That’s baseball.”

That was the postgame lament. The opener, suddenly, was only one game. There would be more to come, new adventures and fresh chances for vindication and better fortune.

Keith Moreland, whose two-run double in the eighth might have made him a hero in his first game as a Padre, was looking ahead.

“We battled hard,” he said, “but we didn’t close ‘em down. We have 161 more to play. We’ve gotta play hard tomorrow and see what happens.”

The biggest problem with the Padres’ yesterday was that it would have been so reminiscent of last year . . . if Houston could have been held to a one-run win.