I did not grow up with baseball.
Where I come from, the sport that stops traffic, fills stadiums, and unites entire cities is fútbol. Baseball was something I knew existed — something American, something loud, something with hotdogs and caps and a lot of standing around that I never quite understood from the outside.
Then I went to an Astros game.
The first thing that surprised me was the length. Baseball is not in a hurry. It does not apologize for taking its time. Coming from a culture where a 90-minute fútbol match feels like the right unit of time for collective emotion, sitting through nine innings required a different kind of attention, slower, more patient, punctuated by sudden bursts of noise that would rise and fall like weather.
I spent a good portion of the first few innings simply watching the crowd more than the field. That is something I do naturally, observe how people inhabit a space, what it reveals about them. And what I saw at Minute Maid Park was fascinating. People here know this game in their bones. They sense when something is about to happen before it does. A subtle shift in the pitcher’s stance, a count that means nothing to me, and suddenly the entire section around me was leaning forward.
That collective anticipation, the shared language of a sport you have grown up with, is something you cannot fake and cannot fully import. You either grew up speaking it or you are learning it as an adult, slowly, with an accent.
I was very much learning with an accent.
But here is what I did understand immediately: the emotion. I did not always know why people cheered or groaned, but I felt it. The woman two rows ahead who covered her eyes. The man who stood up before the play even finished, already certain of what was coming. The children who had no idea what was happening but screamed anyway because everyone else was screaming. Emotion, it turns out, is not a language barrier.
By the seventh inning, which I later learned is a traditional stretch break, another thing nobody warned me about — I had started to follow the logic of it. The tension between pitcher and batter. The geometry of the field. The way a single moment can undo an entire inning of careful strategy.
Is it a long game? Yes. Absolutely yes.
Is it worth going? Also yes. Completely.
There is something about experiencing a sport you did not grow up with, in a country that is not yours, surrounded by people for whom this is memory and identity, it teaches you something about belonging. Not the belonging you are born into, but the kind you build slowly, one confusing inning at a time.
Houston, I am starting to understand you.
