When he was only 23, the Cleveland Indians promoted Randy Adamack ’73 to his dream job as director of public relations.

But when the lifetime Indians fan began his first full season at spring training in 1975, he wondered if he’d been careful enough about what he’d wished for.

“That was the year that we named Frank Robinson as the first African American manager in major league history,” recalled Adamack, at the time the youngest public relations director in major league baseball.

“The level of attention and the media interest was tremendous. I didn’t realize how much more coverage we were getting than normal until about mid season, when some of the beat writers pointed out that this had been an incredible couple of months....

“It was little overwhelming,” added Adamack, who grew up in Conneaut in northeastern Ohio and majored in economics at Wittenberg. “I was going through spring training in Tucson, and all of a sudden, I was at Hi Corbett Field looking at mountains and the ballpark and the club house I’d been reading about all my life. I’ll admit I had a big smile on my face, but when I went home at night I said, ‘This is going to be a challenge.’”

Adamack survived spring training. “On opening day, walking into the press box for the first time in that position [public relations director] was just a very special feeling.”

The former Wittenberg second baseman remained with the Indians until 1978 when new ownership arrived. He then left to take a similar position with the year-old Seattle Mariners. The new team promoted him several times, and since 1990 he has served as vice president of communications, responsible for media relations, public information, marketing and broadcasting.

“Our image is everything,” he said. “We work very hard at protecting that.”

Part of his work has been shaping the image of high-profile players such as Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez, now with other teams, and Japanese sensation Ichiro Suzuki.

Adamack also burnished the Mariners’ image during the 1992 arrival of new owners, the five-year process of building a stadium, the opening of SAFECO Field in 1999, and as the Mariners tied a major league record in 2001 by winning 116 games.

“We try to build Mariner baseball on the business side in some ways as a brand,” he says, “so that people, when they think of the Mariners, think of a good experience at the ball park and a championship-caliber baseball team.

“We work very hard at positioning our players as good people and fun people. We want people to know our players as best they can….We work very hard with the production people on our telecasts to use shots of the ballpark, shots of the city, shots of fans having a good time.…We don’t want to get in the way of a game, but those other shots are valuable to us, hopefully, in convincing other people that they want to come out to the ballpark.”

Adamack, 51, said his contributions to these campaigns have been aided by a liberal arts education that taught him to think critically and solve problems. After graduation he enrolled in the graduate program in sports administration at Ohio University, where he interned with the Indians in public relations during the 1974 season. At the end of the internship, he was offered a full-time position. When the Indians public relations director took another job, Adamack filled the opening.

“I had lot of people supporting me and I learned as I went,” Adamack said. “I tried to improve daily and weekly and annually. It was a challenge, but it was what I wanted to do. At some point, I wanted to be public relations director of the Cleveland Indians.”

— Gary Libman