"My whole experience with the A's used to be, I'm going to see what the score is. Now I can’t wait to see what the Single-A affiliate is doing, what the second-string catcher’s batting average is."

The teams and leagues themselves are helping to add to the information pile. Major League Baseball, for example, on its Gameday site not only lays thick the statistical information, but it also gives specific numbers on the speed and trajectory of every pitch. Meanwhile, every major league has its own beat reporters covering every team, taking their everyday information stream past the news release. Highlights are offered, often now before the game ends. Of course, the leagues aren't doing this just because they want a well-informed fan — they also want to get fans to rely on them, not outside sites or media, to get the majority of their information.

Then again, the vast amount of information also has changed the fan-media dynamic so that merely being columnist from the Big City Times doesn't give you a pass. Schur's site, for example, lambastes writers and broadcasters, as well as athletes and management, for perceived idiocy in coming to conclusions that numbers don't bear out.

But with the Internet, a fan can also still choose to be as dumb as he or she wants to be.

Fan and team message boards — whether they're independent or run by a team or league — are filled with people who vent their spleen in ways that probably got them banned from ever being on the air with Buzz and the Fat Man. The tinfoil-hat logic, misspelled profanity and first-grade grammar make for ransom-note style screeds that make you wonder whether someone should invent a font that mimics letters cut out of magazines and pasted together.

"If you’re already a pretty thoughtful fan and you really do want to interpret what the organization is doing, the information is going to help you a lot," Swan said. "If you’ve always been impatient and been a hack, you’re going to use the information to do the exact same thing (online)."