It’s Major League Baseball’s opening day.
Up and down the state, fans will head to ballparks to see their favorite players, sample the latest food innovations, drink craft brews and take in some fresh air (weather permitting).
For David Rinetti, first pitch will be both the end of a sprint and the beginning of a marathon.
“I’m not lying when I tell you I probably have about 50 things going on at once,” he said Wednesday morning.
Rinetti is the vice president of stadium operations for the Oakland Athletics. He’s been in that job since 1994, but started with the team as a high schooler.
“My job was to pass out a sporting newspaper that had Billy Martin on the front cover of it to our fans,” he said. “My first day of work was passing those out on opening night in 1981.”
Suffice to say, things are different. The A’s started sharing the stadium with the Oakland Raiders in 1995, meaning a not insignificant part of Rinetti’s job became running the stadium’s changeovers from football to baseball.
As the team inches toward a new waterfront stadium, I talked with Rinetti about what it takes to get the 50-year-old Oakland Coliseum ready for the season, and what he’ll miss most about the Brutalism exemplar.
So you’ve been around for a while. Tell me about how your job has changed since 1994.
It’s changed significantly based upon a lot of the security things. After 9/11, security procedures changed significantly. And then after the Boston Marathon bombing, it changed again, because the league required all teams to do metal detection.
How long do the changeovers take, and how many people are involved?
My guess is probably close to 100 people that are involved to switch things around. It really depends on how much time we have to get to the next event.
The quickest turnaround that I recall was in 2013. We had a playoff game against the Tigers here, Game 2 of the American League division series on a Saturday and the game ended probably close to 10 p.m. that night and the Raiders had a game the next night at 8 p.m. I think they were done in somewhere around 12 hours.
Anything you think you’d miss?
I’ve been there my entire adult life there you know. So it’s been my life. So I’ll miss it because it’s really been my house for all these years. There’s people associated with the different teams that we share the facility with who won’t be there anymore.
Do you have a favorite spot in the ballpark?
For me personally, it would be right behind the backstop close to the dugout. And it is something that’s unique to only our ballpark. I don’t think there’s any ballpark left that has a walkway from the clubhouse to the dugout that you actually walk by fans. Now, most, if not all have a tunnel from the clubhouse down to the dugout.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.