When Tom Glavine signed with the Mets after the 2002 season, I thought the idea of him winning his 300th game in blue and orange was hilarious. Here was a 37-year-old with 242 career wins signing on with a last-place team that didn’t look to have much hope of getting better in time to do him any good. And for a year or two, that was pretty much right. Glavine pitched well, but pitching well will only do so much good for a team featuring the likes of Jeff Duncan and Timo Perez as vital offensive contributors, and the veteran left-hander went 20–28 in his first two seasons in New York. He looked to have about as much chance of becoming a 300-game winner as Al Leiter did.

This seemed fair to me, given Glavine’s past. Any baseball writer who isn’t lying will admit to some prejudices, and I was, at the time, prejudiced against the Braves. For their offensive team nickname and the ridiculous tomahawk chop, for the maddening layout of their sprawling city and its past as a stronghold of the Confederacy, for John Rocker and the presence of a grown man named Chipper on their roster, I never could stand the Braves. This never carried over to the likes of Glavine, Bobby Cox, or Greg Maddux, but there still seemed to be a certain justice in a senescent Glavine retiring to the old folk’s home in Queens with Mo Vaughn, Roberto Alomar and their ilk and suffering through several wretched seasons of losing baseball — something to make up for Kenny Rogers walking home the winning run in the 1999 playoffs.

Five years on, I still think the sight of Glavine in a Mets uniform is only slightly less bizarre than the sight of Reggie Miller in a Knicks uniform would have been, and I still don’t understand the impulse to self-degradation that allowed the Mets to bring the hated enemy into their own camp and exalt him. How could a team have so little pride? But this doesn’t matter, because Glavine has been more than anyone could have hoped he’d be. Now he’s the longest-tenured player on the best team in the league, and he’ll have his first chance at winning that 300th game tonight. There you have it.

What’s perhaps best about this moment is how unlikely it is. Last year was the first season in which Glavine posted a winning record with the Mets — this has been no fault of his, unless you want to fault him for signing with the Mets in the first place. He’s been one of the more reliably good pitchers in the game during his time in New York, but he’s never been near brilliant, which fits him perfectly — he’s won 20 games five times in his career, but only in 1998 was he ever really better than John Maine has been this season. Glavine has reached greatness simply because of consistency, from pitch to pitch and from year to year, from his early career with a wretched Braves team through the last few seasons that have seen him chipping away toward the 58 wins he needed to reach immortality. There have never been any surprises with him. Through his whole career, you’ve known exactly what you were going to get from him — 200 innings’ worth of pitching that would consist almost entirely of fastballs and change-ups on the outer half of the plate. The only really unexpected thing he’s ever done is to keep pitching at a high level near the end of his career.

This, maybe more than his past as a Brave, has made him a truly strange and jarring fit with the Mets. Throughout their history, their success has always been driven by genuine brilliance, usually the kind that comes out of nowhere. From Tom Seaver’s preposterous dominance to Dwight Gooden having perhaps the best pitching season of all time before he was old enough to drink to Jose Reyes developing into Rickey Henderson, the team has always been driven by outsized achievement, the kind better appreciated during a game than over a season, and better appreciated over a season than over a career. Glavine is precisely the opposite sort of player, the anti-Met, his true greatness only becoming apparent with time.

Throughout Glavine’s career, justly celebrated as he has been, he has always had to face the skeptics — those who said he didn’t throw hard enough, or strike enough batters out, who contended that his success was nothing more than an illusion. Some illusion! 299 wins into his career, it is still mostly fastballs and changeups away, and he is still more impressive in the abstract than in the moment. That’s no insult. The Mets have had their share of short-lived brilliance. It took bringing on someone capable of something more than that for them to become a great team.

tmarchman@nysun.com