Americans overseas can stay plugged into the U.S. sports scene

Trying to find live coverage of U.S. sporting events while abroad used to require the skills of a detective, the tenacity of a bulldog and a wee bit of the luck of the Irish.

Ray Maietta of Bohemia, N.Y., who travels extensively on business, is such a die-hard Yankee fan -- he held season tickets for 15 years -- that he tries to limit his travel during the playoffs.

On a trip to Germany four years ago in October, “I couldn’t even get a score,” he said. He turned to an international headline news station and watched the sports scores running across the bottom of the screen: “I’d watch the ticker, just hoping.”

He was on the road again in October and didn’t have access to a TV for one of the playoff games between the N.Y. Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. But this time he had his laptop and Internet access, so he logged onto MLB.com, the official major league baseball website, paid $3 and listened to a live radio broadcast of the game over the Internet.

These days, U.S. sports fans traveling abroad can count on the Internet and a new American sports channel to help make watching or listening to their favorite teams’ important matches a little easier. Usually, you need only a laptop and Internet access -- or maybe just a pint of Guinness at a local pub.

As Maietta and others have discovered, 4-year-old MLB.com radio “has been a staple product almost since day one” for baseball fans, said Jim Gallagher, MLB.com spokesman.

“It’s about the best value in sports today,” he said.

“At $15 for the entire season, you have the opportunity to listen to every game played. You can even select whether you listen to hometown feed or away feed.”

Fifteen baseball teams also offer a Spanish-language option. Fans can listen live to the game or catch it later in an archive.

“In [Britain], for example, you can listen to a game at a much more civilized hour over your tea and crumpets,” Gallagher said.

Other major league websites, such as NBA.com for basketball, NFL.com for football and NHL.com for hockey, also have their own online radio products. These enable fans to catch live broadcasts of their favorite teams anywhere they can establish an Internet connection, even a dial-up.

Last year, MLB.com became the only official professional sports website to offer a live video feed of games when it launched MLB.tv, which requires a high-speed Internet connection. Like local TV coverage, blackout restrictions apply to the live online video broadcasts.

Using my home computer and a DSL connection, I logged onto MLB.tv to watch an archived version of Game 4 of last year’s World Series between the Sox and Cardinals -- pre-game warm-up, commercials (which you can speed past) and all.

The quality of the picture in its 3-inch-by-4 inch format on my computer was on the low end of acceptable, but the action was seamless and not quite as jumpy as on some online video streaming.

At the full 17-inch width of my computer screen, however, it was like watching television while wearing someone else’s prescription glasses. I could follow what was happening, but the image was blurry.

Improvements are on the way.

“We’re going to provide television-quality video for next season,” said Gallagher, who noted that about 400,000 fans subscribed to MLB.tv last year.

The major sports leagues’ websites also include programming information about live TV broadcasts on local stations abroad, including a new European outlet for American sports fans in Europe, called the North American Sports Network, or NASN.

This 24-hour digital television channel broadcasts U.S. and Canadian sports programming to an estimated 40,000 subscribers in Britain, including many bars and hotels.

NASN was launched in 2002 by Amory B. Schwartz, an American expatriate living in London who resented the coverage of darts and snooker on British TV while he struggled to find coverage of major U.S. sporting events. With the financial backing of Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, NASN expanded into Germany in 2004 and expects to make further inroads into Europe this year, including in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

“We are also looking at various parts of Eastern Europe,” said Heidi Kuntze, NASN spokeswoman.

More than two dozen bars and clubs in Britain as well as a handful of hotels offer NASN programming. For a list, go to www.nasn.com, click on FAQs, then on “Is NASN shown in any pubs and clubs?”

Programming includes games from the major professional U.S. sports leagues, as well as NCAA football and basketball and even NASCAR. You could have caught USC in the Orange Bowl live -- though it was at 1 a.m. local time. And if you happened to be in London during the New Year’s holiday and didn’t want to miss a bowl game, NASN had you covered for Michigan and Texas at the Rose Bowl. For the cost of a pint of beer you could have stopped by O’Neill’s bar on Wardour Street in central London and watched it live on NASN at 9:30 p.m. Or if you wanted to watch the game in the privacy of your hotel room, you could have checked into the Connaught Hotel in London’s upscale Mayfair neighborhood and flipped on the telly.

Such in-room sports luxury comes at a price. A superior queen room at the Connaught on New Year’s weekend was listed on Expedia at $385 a night.

But if you’re just looking to grab a pint and watch the Superbowl (which isn’t being carried on NASN), try www.sportspub.co.uk. Superbowl XXXIX -- Feb. 6 in Jacksonville, Fla. -- will be a major event in London, and you’ll probably need to purchase tickets in advance. This site provides links to pubs that will have a broadcast of the big game.

*

Contact James Gilden at www.theinternettraveler.com. Travel Insider welcomes comments but can’t respond individually to letters and calls. Write to Travel Insider, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., CA 90012; e-mail travel@latimes .com.