PORTLAND – Another saturated spring, another Portland Sea Dogs home opener with Will Call left holding Mother Nature’s tickets.

“The fact that we’ve come this far,” team president and general manager Charlie Eshbach said in the middle of Friday’s fourth inning, while the Hadlock Field grounds crew attacked the mound and batter’s boxes with bags of stay-dry, “is a miracle.”

No, the real miracle is that any Maine-based organization conducting 40 percent of its annual business outdoors during April and May is able to turn a profit.

Here in this textbook location, location, location on the corner of St. John Street and Park Avenue, the Sea Dogs perpetually bask in the black because they provide the quintessential American experience (peanuts, hot dogs, a foamy beverage and a baseball game) sanctioned by the ultimate New England brand name (your world champion Boston Red Sox).

God, clearly a hockey fan with a twisted sense of humor, piggybacked a week of 65 degrees and sunshine with a frosty 44, underscored by drizzle and an ill wind off the back bay. The, um, paid attendance of 5,358, and we’re told umbrellas didn’t count toward the total, witnessed a pedestrian 3-1 Eastern League loss to the New Britain Rock Cats.

By the width of the third-base line, that beat last year’s four days of waiting for a five-inch snow pack to dissolve.

While the front office can’t buy a break, the Sea Dogs can’t scrounge up enough nickels and dimes in the apartment couch cushions to obtain a hit during the Hot Stove portion of the schedule.

Last year, Jacoby Ellsbury (whatever happened to that guy?) sprayed four hits around the yard, albeit lacing into the final out in his sixth at-bat of a season-opener that was three minutes shorter than a Senate filibuster.

The next wave of hopefuls one heartbeat and a hamstring pull away from the bigs needed six innings to scratch out that many singles and doubles, collectively, Friday against the Rock Cats. Portland added only two more hits after stretch time in a wisp of a rally that fittingly concluded with a 5-4-3 double play in the ninth.

That’s been the tale of the Sea Dogs’ first eight days north of Fort Myers. Let’s just say Portland’s team batting average is beneath the numerical threshold of Paris Hilton’s last IQ exam and somewhere betwixt manager Arnie Beyeler’s systolic and diastolic likely post-game blood pressure readings.

With the improbable exception of shortstop and No. 9 hitter Iggy Suarez, everyone lugging lumber to the dish for the ‘Dogs in this homecoming was swinging south of .250. Six of them started the game .174 or below.

Now, the good news. Those latest misadventures with the bat merely cost the Sea Dogs sole possession of first place in the Northern Division.

Portland went 5-1 on its opening road trip by allowing a nasty nine runs, seven earned, over 55-plus innings pitched. Clay Buchholz, Jon Lester and Jonathan Papelbon, we hardly knew ye.

There’s no telling whether or not Portland’s prospective staff will meet or surpass the bar set so sky-high by its recent alumni. That spankin’ new clubhouse in right field is equipped with a revolving door, you know. Every professional baseball franchise is an object lesson in trickle-down economics, with market changes dictated by the health and efficiency of the million-dollar arms attached to the parent club.

Whether or not Friday’s starter Michael Bowden and fellow prospects Justin Masterson and Kris Johnson are here another day, week, month or two years depends upon myriad circumstances uncontrollable as that green blob on the Doppler screen. But their early-season dominance during this span when the hitters legendarily lag behind the hurlers bodes well for the Sea Dogs’ hopes of hoisting a second Eastern League pennant in three years.

The hitters will catch up. This team will win frequently. And really, if your summers live and die with the biorhythms of the Red Sox, isn’t that thought, that feeling, enough to keep you warm and dry on the most intolerably damp, dreary night in the bleachers?

For too many years – make that decades – the “Red Sox farm system” shared space on the oxymoron ladder with “truth in advertising” and “religious tolerance.” If you’re old enough to remember carrying all your hopes for the franchise’s future in the Steve “Psycho” Lyons basket, you get my drift.

Since securing its logical, geographically beneficial spot on Boston’s minor league ladder, Portland has been a pipeline to the potential Team of the Decade. Ten years ago, Kason Gabbard would have been Brian Rose or Carl Pavano, the be-all, end-all to make us forget about Roger Clemens. In this era, he was expendable trade bait to help the Sox overpay for a different, nearsighted name in the Mitchell Report.

Impossible to say after this week of toting toothpicks who in the Sea Dogs’ everyday gang might be the next Ellsbury, or Kevin Youkilis, or Dustin Pedroia. Smarter baseball minds than mine have anointed catcher Mark Wagner as a future facsimile of Jason Varitek, and that’s good enough for me. It’s a safe bet that Andrew Pinckney, Aaron Bates, Jeff Natale and Zach Daeges will snap out of this early funk and make a push for Triple-A by the time the thermometer cracks 70, too.

Seven to nine bucks admission to this 7,368-seat, sparkling diamond pretty much guarantees that you’ll eyeball four or five guys bound for that historic joint where it costs you $40 to park.

“We didn’t win, but we got the game in,” Eshbach said. “That’s an upset.”

Weather, or not, “upset” is not how anybody who carries a torch for the Boston Red Sox will depart Hadlock Field, anytime soon.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is koakes