Heard the one about the female Baltimore philosophy teacher who fell in love with cricket? Neither had we. Karen Welbourn had never seen the game - even on screen - until last month. She takes up the story Thursday, February 21, 2002

It's not easy being an anomaly.

In my case, it has meant sleepless nights, a small fortune in airmail postage, and frequent explanations that I'm neither an expatriate nor the spouse of one. To friends abroad, I'm a curiosity; to my fellow countrymen, I'm downright eccentric. In fact, I'm just a member of an admittedly uncommon species: the home-grown cricket-mad American.

And a female of the species, to boot.

It started a couple of years ago, when I, an unassuming baseball fan, joined my first web community. The participants spanned the globe, and our cross-cultural conversations were often enlightening … that is, until the subject turned to sport, and I would find myself fending off disparaging comments about "my" game, which was held by certain of my chat partners to be a childish descendant of their favorite - sorry, "favourite" - sport.

"Baseball is to cricket what checkers is to chess," one fellow sniffed, and I was left without a snappy comeback. For, while these English and Australian folks could claim familiarity with America's national pastime by way of an allegedly similar playground version, rounders, their game was a complete mystery to me. Fine, I decided: I would just have to learn something about cricket.

Alas, the project got off to a slow start, as most of my virtual pals responded to my initial request for an explanation of the noble game by reciting those "Rules of Cricket for Foreigners" straight from the tea-towel. Undaunted, I took my search to the internet, where I was fortunate in April 2000 to stumble across the weekly Tuesday-night chat at The Cricketer magazine's website. Warmly welcomed upon wandering in and asking for help, I was at last on my way to understanding cricket.

What I didn't count on was becoming completely hooked on it.

The chat group took this novice in hand. On their advice I got hold of a copy of Rob Eastaway's book What is a Googly? and finally began to make sense of the laws. By the time CricInfo began their audio webcasts of England's one-dayers later that summer, I knew enough about the game to listen. And by then I had also discovered just how much cricket literature there is out there and - unfortunately for my budget - just how easy it is to mail-order secondhand books via the web. Authors from Neville Cardus to Frances Edmonds soon graced my shelves.

It was a steep learning curve, but by 2001 I had a home team (England, natch), a preferred form of the game (Tests, of course), an alltime favourite player (the divine David Gower), my very own web page devoted to cricket, and tickets to Headingley for the then-upcoming Ashes Test, which I planned to see with some of my mentors.

Welcome as I've been made in this new milieu, the fact remains that by birth I am the ultimate cricket outsider. As such, I occasionally differ with my more conservative friends on subjects like increasing the number of Test-playing nations, or adding cricket to the Olympics. And it's probably fair to say that my continued defence of baseball hasn't won that game any English converts yet.

In the end, circumstances prevented me from travelling last summer, and I missed Mark Butcher's phenomenal innings at Headingley. Instead, and perhaps fittingly, I would see my first international cricket via the internet. Just last month, Wisden.com presented video webcasts of the England-India ODIs, and I gave up six nights' sleep to watch my team tie the series with their hosts.

I didn't regret a wink of it.

Karen Welbourn is a philosophy teacher and mother of three from Baltimore who says she spends way too much time online.

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