XM is another good option, the programming is worth just the baseball, but there is also plenty of other good stuff to listen to on there. Usually they only play the home team radio for games.

I got one of those portable XM radios - you know it's about the size of a Walkman.  It's $330 - ouch. And then it's ~$14 a month.  Spendy.  But here's the thing: it's also an MP3 player, you can rig it to transmit to your car radio and with 150+ channels on XM you're bound to find something you like to listen to.  I know I have.  The blues station is great, you get BBC News, the alt country station is excellent - lotsa good content.

Bottom line: $500 the first year.  You can go cheaper - they make a $59 unit for just your car and no MP3 player.  Anyway I've grown to love it.

How much is the MLB.tv package?

i'm hoping my cable provider has EI again (they added it mid-season last year after all that direct tv thing played out).  but i don't remember what the status was going to be on that this season...

I live in Chicago and most of the time, I can't get WTAM, for whatever reason. Good luck to you in the Hoosier state.

I got a Pioneer Inno for XM - it's great not only for baseball.  Threre's a lot of good programing.  The Inno is pricey - about $300, but it is portable and gets a good signal outside as long as you point it toward the satellite.  It also has an MP3 player and lets you record songs when you hear them on XM.

I justified the subscription price as about equal to the EI package.

The only problem with XM is that you only get the home team's radio feed (until the WS), so you only hear Hammy half the time.

Since the window in my old office faced due North, I couldn't pick up the signal there.  I found two ways to solve this.  I bought the audio package on mlb.com.  It's about $15.00 for the season.  That gives you both the home and away radio feeds for every game.  I also changed jobs, and now my window gets a signal - but listening to Indians games was not a big part of that decision.

Between all this - and a trusty am radio when it's dark so WTAM's signal carries to the East coast, I didn't miss many games.

Also, the big advantage MLB.tv has over EI, in my opinion, is that you can watch archived games and condensed games whenever you want -- which is really great if, say, you wanted to watch Phil Hughes's first MLB start or something. With EI (and satellite radio) you just get the live games.

This year, which I wish I would've done last year, I will be registering with an overseas credit card. I believe they black out based on your location, so hopefully this will help me get around that.

Does anyone have any experience with that?

The picture/streaming quality has improved significantly from a couple years ago.  I rarely ran into connection issues during games (I have a DSL connection).  

I agree, it is a bit pricey, but as someone who will watch 75-85% of the games, I think it's worth it.  I believe the radio station is included with the tv package.  It comes down to a matter of preference, if you feel like the radio broadcast would be adequate for what you're looking for.  They're both solid options, but I prefer being able to watch the games.  

I went through 2006 with MLB.tv rather than EI and wasn't thrilled with the situation.  The picture quality is not remotely comparable -- not even with the "enhanced" version -- and the experience of watching on your computer is also not comparable to putting it up on your TV.  HD or no HD, a cable or satellite TV picture is just much higher quality than streaming web video -- not to mention the constant disruption of latency and buffering.

So to me, the extra $30-60 and the loss of portability (can't get it at the office) were worth the tradeoff of being able to watch a good picture reliably and comfortably in my own living room, where I watch perhaps 70-80 games.  (It also helps that I can work from home whenever I want, so I often can arrange to be at home for weekday afternoon games.)

I supplement with the Sprint MLB package, which costs just $36 for the whole season and provides home + away + Esp radio broadcasts of every single game.  Better even than XM -- which has only one broadcast per game -- it's "Ham-on-demand."  I just made a conscious choice to be Zen-like about the blackouts and the times I can't be at home for a game.  Rather than grouse about them, I just take the opportunity to listen to Ham rather than watch a grainy web video and pay a lot more money for it.

It helps of course that I have an unlimited Sprint data package, and there are only a handful of games all year that I would want to listen to that wouldn't fall under "nights and weekends," which for me begin at 7:00 EST.  So it all works out pretty well.

That's my story.  I look forward to HD but basically won't buy the TV until at least a couple Indians games a week are available in HD.  TV's keep getting better and cheaper, so I figure time is on my side.  But I won't go back to web video if I can possibly help it.  The savings over cable is maybe two bucks a week, and it's just not worth it.