There is an opera in Vienna, maybe you have heard of it. There are several, in fact. Opera is the city’s spectacle of choice. Music is loved here, as is theater, and opera combines everything into a single spectacle.

I saw an opera in the United States once, and I remember it as being a little crappy in comparison to a Viennese opera. That was more than twenty-five years ago. Ever since then, I believed Americans lacked the knack for such a public spectacle. Moon landing, okay. Atom bomb even. But regular public cultural spectacle?

I had never been to a pro baseball game.

I never thought I’d have anything nice to say about baseball. As a kid, it did not appear on my radar. My father had to wait until they had my little sister to have someone to play catch and talk sports with. They would watch TV and talk pitching and batting averages and to me arcane statistics.

When foreigners, assuming all Americans must understand baseball, would ask me to explain the game to them, I would often just make various shit up, in the hope that I was pretty close.

Infield fly rule? What?

So I was in the United States for the last two weeks of July. The coolest thing I did was attend a Seattle Mariners’ game.

My sister has season tickets in the very first row by the left field foul line just up from third base. I understand they are good seats. They seemed that way to me. I attended with my two daughters, and my oldest daughter’s friend, and my cousin’s boy who is their age.

It was bat night and all the kids got bats, so things got off to a cool start. It was an evening game. The stadium was enormous and new and clean and very neat. The architecture was very impressive and theatrical. The lighting was beautiful. The grass was a perfect shade of vivid green and the red dirt of the infield reminded me of the earth we had seen in the South of France a week or so previously.

My sister had warned me that balls were often hit into the seats we occupied. One had gone through the hair of a friend’s young daughter once, striking the seat behind her head and freaking everyone out. So I vowed to pay close attention. I did pretty well, too, although towards the end it often happened that I would be thinking about something, and there would be a CRACK and the crowd would roar and I’d be all, oh shit, where’s the ball, where’s the ball? But we never got hit by a ball, so it was okay in that respect.

The kids enjoyed it. The two older girls disappeared at one point and came back with foot-long hotdogs. I went upstairs with Gamma and got the same for her and me and my cousin’s kid, as well as an eight-dollar microbrew and some garlic fries (highly recommended) and some pop for the kids.

The Mariners were playing some other team. It looked like they had a D on their caps. The other team won, but not thanks to Ichiro, who was the star of the whole spectacle.

That guy is cool, let me tell you. The way he gets set up before hitting. The way he holds his bat out in front of him, vertically, and plucks at his shoulder with the other hand. The consistent way he hits, and the way he hustles.

And the other elements, the peanut vendors and the big television screens and the scoreboard and the people in the crowd goofing for the cameras and the way the sky went from blue to purple to black, and the lost seagull flying in big circles inside the stadium. Other people talking statistics and complaining about the pitching. The single guy a few seats away rooting for the other team.

My kids kept asking me to explain everything to them. Sometimes I tried, sometimes I told them to ask their cousin, who didn’t know much more than I did, which made me like him even more than I already did.

So baseball is American opera. I was able to forget about all the money involved, and all the steroids and my dislike of crowds and just enjoy being there. Enjoy the spectacle and the pleasure of being part of a crowd that was, for the moment, doing no harm. I never thought I’d say that.