Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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The Minnesota Twins, in case you have been encased in a pulsating pupa the past couple of months, have been soldiering through another difficult season on the field. This year, it's hard for them to hit the ball.

Their onfield tribulations have been made more difficult by a stadium funding crisis which threatens to drive the team into the arms of some outstate billionaire who can get his legislature to do what our billionaire can't get his legislature to do: underwrite with taxpayer dollars a big new building in which to play games.

The rationale for this turmoil is that the team just can't make enough money, and thus be competitive, and thus fire the hearts of locals with victories, without a nice new building. The old building, in which nothing good can happen is, what, 18 years old.

Throughout the controversy, it has struck me how obsolete it all seems. Here we live in an age that is delocalizing like crazy. I can chat on the Internet with a correspondent in Burma as easily as hollering across my neighbor's fence. A surgeon in Johannesburg can direct the slicing open, via satellite, of an esophagus in Minot. A billion dollars can circle the entire globe electronically in half a second. Using ordinary phone lines, people on six continents can munch caramel rolls and talk.

But baseball pretends it is this unchanged sacred tradition, requiring stadiums. Tradition has nothing to do with it, or Ebbets Field would still be ringing up ticket sales. It has to do with sports economics, an industry protected against competition, and a targeted, captive, local market -- us.

The insistence on same-time/same-place plays right into the hands of the bad guys. They say we need a stadium to celebrate our community's greatness. But baseball about the relationship to "the community" that a crow has to a run-over squirrel. In every other sense, locality in sports died ages ago. It's been over a century since professional ballplayers, wearing a city's colors, were expected to hail from that city. In ordinary life, these people would be called outsiders, "ringers." To keep fans inflamed and turnstiles turning, baseball calls them the "home team." Free agency forever sundered whatever faint threads still connected loyalty and locality.

What we need is a new structure that moves baseball away from the idea of a home team. If it's too expensive to play in $400 million stadiums, let's find a more affordable medium to play in.

One such structure is getting a workout in California this month. A minor league team based in Fresno, the Fresno Grizzlies have begun to broadcast games not just to local viewers and listeners, but to the entire world, via the Internet.

The game's lazy pace is what makes it perfect for the wired world, says an organizer of the first live Internet video broadcast of a professional baseball game. "Baseball is not like the Indy 500 or basketball, in that there's movement but not on a level that requires a high level of resolution," said the producer of the Internet broadcast.

The first game was broadcast on Memorial Day, between the Grizzlies and the Albuquerque Dukes -- AAA teams for the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers. Anyone with an Internet connection was free to watch, and I did, at the Grizzlies web site (http://www.fresnogrizzlies.com). It was also shown on The Intercaster (http://www.amintercast.com).

It wasn't quite like watching a game on TV. The system showed images of ballplayers running, hitting, and sliding at up to 10 frames per second. That's better than the choppy video standard you are familiar with for cheap teleconferencing, which jerks along at only one frame per second.

The action scenes, speeded up so you felt you were missing something, suffered the most. The rest of the game was pretty good. Certainly, it was less social sitting at the screen than sitting behind the visitor's dugout.

Still, it was baseball. On the Internet. And the first-place Grizzlies extended their winning streak to 10 with a 5-1 victory. Go, Grizzlies.

Now, big league teams with lavish cable deals won't want to go this route. But it points toward a new way of communicating for smaller clubs with far-flung fans. And it opens the possibility of a team with no home stadium at all. A game could be shot anywhere, in a corn field or back alley. Or it could be made up entirely, like Rotisserie League play, using computers to let probabilities churn out virtual results.

I say, go local, and have a real hometown team, or go loco, and don't let your imagination be fettered by a little thing like a 100-million-ton stadium. Rotisserie baseball, and now Internet baseball, have shown us the way, cheering plays that may "happen" only in the cyberspace of the mind.

For years we've felt that high-priced players are phoning in their plays anyway. Let's let them do it for real.

For an update on Mike's HGRA team (ages 10-12), check out the Comets.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.