Let146;s go Mets

Highs of a baseball addict

YIPEE! The wait is over. Tommy Glavine has got his 300th victory. He is only the 23rd pitcher in the history of baseball to do it and only the fifth lefty. But more importantly he is the first pitcher in the Mets uniform to do it. Yipee!

When I call up my friend Bipin to announce this stunning news, he8217;s sceptical. 8220;Do you own the Mets or what?8221; he asks me having been rudely woken up from his sleep. 8220;Well, no,8221; I say, 8220;I don8217;t own the Mets. But they certainly own me.8221;

The Mets have owned me since 1986 when I went to America as a student in 1986 and promptly fell in love with baseball. That was the year the New York Mets won the World Series. For the last time. And I am almost convinced that they did it just to show me a good time! And what a World Series it was!

Anyway I was hooked, and now I feel alive only during the baseball season April-October and walk around like a zombie for the rest of the year waiting for the baseball season. My friends think this is very sad. But I always say, 8220;That8217;s the way it is.8221; Though Glavine8217;s record was the one that mattered to me most, it wasn8217;t even the most important record of the week. That was Barry Bond8217;s catching up with the legendary Hank Aaron8217;s record of the maximum number of home runs in a career 8212; 755. And though the excitement of the record has been dented by allegations of steroid use, it8217;s still the big one. This record, to put it in cricketing terms, is much like Brian Lara crossing Sir Garfield Sobers8217; record of the highest Test score 8212; 365.

So Glavine did it against the Chicago Cubs in his

second attempt, and I was following the game on the scoreboard on nytimes.com like a hawk. I let out a big cheer when the game was over and Glavine had won.

I read recently that they were trying to introduce the game in China. As usual, the Americans don8217;t get it. It would be much easier to introduce the game to India as we already have cricket. But really, it doesn8217;t matter because the New York Mets won8217;t be playing in India anytime soon, anyway.