Baseball in Europe?

On Easter Sunday, March 31, a little after 7 p.m. local time, at a former railroad station in downtown Houston, a great annual ritual will begin. 

Less than 20 people -- mostly professional athletes but also umpires, base coaches, batboys, ball girls, etc. -- will assemble on a large field, with several thousand baseball fans in surrounding seats and a few million more watching on television. 

At 7:05, the home plate umpire will signal for play to begin, and Bud Norris will throw the first pitch to Texas Rangers second-baseman Ian Kinsler. With that, the Houston Astros will officially enter the American League, and the 2013 major league baseball season will begin. 

I apologize that this long, flowery windup is only to set up a bad joke, but here goes. 

I am a lifelong baseball fan and an unabashed Wagnerian. Richard, not Honus, although I greatly admire the work of both these men, who more than excelled in their chosen fields. They're connected, by the way, because Richard wrote an opera based on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which also was the nickname of the speedy, German-descended Honus.

If a professional baseball league is ever established in Europe, my dream is to buy the team in Nuremberg (or to the Germans, Nürnberg).

I would have a couple of good choices for a team name, the most obvious of which is Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (or the Mastersingers of Nuremberg), after Wagner's great comic opera of the same name, which has as one of its main characters a fellow named Hans Sachs, the wise and avuncular cobbler. Although the uniform makers might have some trouble getting the entire team name on the jerseys, one would assume the players on a team with that name could sing "Deutschland Über Alles" before taking the field for each game, so I could save money on an organist. 

But my primary reason for buying the Nuremberg nine would be so I could call it:

The Nürnberg Hans Sox!

I warned you.

Ball spielen!

Now let's go to Eric down on the stage...

When athletes are interviewed after a game, how many times do you hear the same stock answers (usually to the same stock questions) about how we all worked so hard, and we just take this one game at a time, what a great team this is and what great fans we have, etc., etc.? Almost every time? And generally, they never say anything interesting or that you didn't already know.

Well, the same thing has become true in the "interviews" during the intermissions of the Metropolitan Opera's HD transmissions of Saturday matinee performances. They're all very happy and positive and effusive and excited. They all worked so hard, and they all just love every minute they're working together (that's when you start to wonder), and what a great cast and production team this is, etc., etc. And generally, they never say anything interesting or that you didn't already know.

Then there's the frequent problem of the jarring mood change, as in the recent Parsifal transmission. The first act of Wagner's final masterpiece is nearly two hours of gloomy, almost crushing depression (the fantastic music makes it bearable, even uplifting). But after the music ends and the emotionally exhausted audience watches the camera switch backstage, there's the broadcast's happy, effusive "host," baritone Eric Owens, with a big smile on his face as he stops the exhausted lead tenor, Jonas Kaufmann, for a bit of inane banter. This isn't Mr. Owens' fault -- he's just doing what he was hired to do.

And add to that the fact that, due to the international nature of casting almost any opera, but especially at the Met, many of those interviewed have accents that make them practically unintelligible. Perhaps the most interesting thing that happens in the interviews is when one of the singers commandeers the microphone and delivers a message to friends and family back home in their native tongue (as both Kaufmann and bass Rene Pape did during their Parsifal interviews). It's nice to see them speaking confidently, even if you don't know what they're saying, instead of having to watch their sometimes painful struggle to find the right words in English.

Surely the brains who came up with this incredible idea of broadcasting live opera into movie theaters can come up with a better way to fill the intermission time. Why not an expert (not too stuffy, of course) to talk about that day's opera? The radio broadcasts did that for years, but apparently that's too passe now, and they've switched to mostly interviews, too, although their questioners are a little more insightful than the singers who conduct the video "interviews."

I wouldn't mind seeing a broadcast version of the famous Opera Quiz, which has been a staple of the radio broadcasts for longer than most of us have been alive. Even just the backstage cameras showing the incredible Met stagehands changing the sets between acts, which the producers already show between the interviews, would be better.

Back to you, Mel.