For small price, baseball games easily accessible

Say bye-bye to listening to your favorite baseball team's games on the Internet for free.

Beginning Monday, you will have to pay to get live audio of major league baseball games. For $9.95 a season, fans can listen to every club's 162 games. That amounts to 4,500 live games a year, well worth the cost to the displaced baseball fan.

The games are being provided by MLB.com, which joined forces with Internet software audio and video giant RealNetworks Inc. The $9.95 subscription will allow fans to access every game from MLB.com on each club's site. By registering through MLB.com, fans also can get a $10 gift certificate to the site's online store.

But be aware of another potential cost. RealNetwork is pushing customers to subscribe to RealPlayer Plus. There's no need to spend $4.95 a month ($29.70 total charge) for the upgraded audio. RealPlayer 8 Basic is free and serves the purpose just fine. The hardest part may be finding where to download the free player. It's easiest to find by going directly to real.com site and scrolling down to "Top Free Downloads."

Another cost-cutting tip: Some of the teams' local stations - such as San Francisco Giants' KNBR - plan to keep audio on their Web site until further specifics from Major League Baseball. Internet audio on KXLY (920-AM), which carries Seattle Mariners games in Spokane, will cost fans beginning Monday.

Staying on the topic of MLB.com, if you've noticed the 30 team sites have a cookie-cutter look to them this year, you're right. MLB, under the limited partnership of MLB Advanced Media, took over the domain. Now, the Minnosota Twins look as slick as the New York Yankees, at least on the Internet. The URLs are uniform, too. Mariners.org is now mariners.mlb.com. Clevelandindians.com is indians.mlb.com, and so on.

The Mariners report business is booming on its special Japanese- language team site. With the addition of Japanese superstar Ichiro Suzuki, the M's had 35,000 extended stay visitors from Japan from March 28-April 3. That's an increase of 10,000 from last year. That works out to about 17,000 extended visits per week, the team's highest ever from Japan.

How'd your bracket stack up?

Jeff Hinkle of Fort Collins, Colo., correctly predicted 54 of the 63 games in the the NCAA men's tournament to win $10,000 in the ESPN.com sweepstakes.

Hinkle totaled 1,520 points and clinched the grand prize in a tiebreaker on the final night. He predicted the final score would be Duke 78, Arizona 72, coming within four points of the actual score. The poor guy who came in second was two points off Hinkle's prediction.

Hinkle, one of about 750,000 contestants, guessed correctly in 26 out of 32 games in the first round, 14 out of 16 in the second round and got seven of his eight teams into the Elite Eight. From that point, he didn't miss a game.

Fantasy Leaguers listen up

RotoNews.com, the gold standard of fantasy league sites - particularly in posting injuries - is now RotoWire.com. The same management, editorial and technology teams are running the site, so don't look for any dropoff in quality.

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