Some Baseball Fans Prefer Surfing Internet Provides The Displaced With Great Way To Stay Informed

Not so long ago, kids sat in class with a radio tucked in their coat pockets and an earplug stuck in their ears so they could listen to the play-by-play of their favorite baseball team.

Those kids are grown now, and they’re playing virtual hooky at work by keeping up with ballgames on the Internet.

Instead of the soothing voices of Vin Scully or Ernie Harwell, fans get play-by-play the cyberspace way, brought to you by cybercasters who file updates by computer every halfinning.

The grand ol’ pastime is getting hipper all the time.

Just imagine the possibilities for the MTV generation: Junior drops his in-line skates at the bottom of the stairs and starts surfing the net to check on his fantasy baseball team. The radical riffs of Rage Against The Machine and Tool blare in the background.

At least two dozen major-league baseball teams have official Internet sites, including the expansion Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who haven’t even started playing yet, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, who stopped playing a long time ago.

The sites feature notes, stats, trivia and history. Some have advanced features, such as highlight films and interviews.

The latest baseball craze on the World Wide Web is play-by-play as it happens at the ballpark. In its simplest form, a rudimentary account of each half-inning is typed into a computer by the cybercaster and transmitted all over the world. The Cleveland Indians’ site, for example, employs about 10 cybercasters.

“One of our guys really puts a lot of spirit into it,” said King Hill of DigiKnow, the company that created the Indians’ site. “He takes his title of cybercaster very seriously. We’ve gotten e-mail saying they ought to put him in the broadcast booth with Herb Score.”

Cybercasts are useful to fans who have moved away from their favorite team and can’t get the games on radio or TV. A diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan living in Buffalo no longer has to spend hours fiddling with the radio dial to hear Jack Buck paint a picture of the games.

“It’s for the geographically challenged fan,” said Craig Atkinson, associate editor of ISWire, a Burlington, Vt., computer newsletter. Hill said he has even gotten e-mail from an Indians fan who lives at the South Pole.

The service also comes in handy for fans who want to keep up with the game at the office while looking like they’re working.

“It was kind of funny when we had that day-night doubleheader against the Yankees,” said Valerie Arcuri, the Indians’ director of advertising and publications. “During the day game, we had tons of people coming into the site from Cleveland-area businesses.”

As Hill put it: “These are the same people who have spreadsheets as screen savers.”

In Cleveland, the cybercast has come in handy since the rest of the Indians’ home schedule this season at Jacobs Field is sold out.

If fans don’t want to pay outrageous markups to scalpers, they can have - what else? - virtual seats.

“People used to plan trips to Cleveland around going to the game,” Arcuri said. “They can’t do that anymore.”

Some teams’ sites are advanced. Radio broadcasts can actually be heard over the Internet for White Sox, Royals, Orioles, Marlins and Dodgers games.

The growth of this option has been slow due to copyright issues, Hill said. Many sites have graphics, too.