Philadelphia ? Rick McElhattan totaled the cost of attending the doubleheader the other day between the Phillies and Dodgers at Citizens Bank Park. There with his wife and two boys, ages six and eight, McElhattan had not even found his seats yet, but was considerably lighter in the wallet.

Parking: $10.

Two baseball caps for the boys at $22 a pop: $44.

Food: $40.

“And this doesn’t even count the price of our seats,” says McElhattan, who is 42 and on disability. “So at $22 apiece, that comes to $88. So it adds up.”

Surely you know by now that supporting a professional sports team is an expensive hobby. But it could well become even more expensive for some of you, depending on the outcome of an interesting lawsuit this summer that has a St. Louis-based fantasy-league operator at odds with Major League Baseball in part over who owns the statistics that are generated by the players.

Baseball is asserting that the unlicensed use of statistics violates the “right to publicity,” which is to say: There is value in that home run Bobby Abreu hit on Sunday beyond the fact that he enabled the Phillies to beat the Dodgers in Game 1 of the twinbill.

So what do the fans think of that?

“My initial reaction is shock,” McElhattan says. “What are they (baseball) going to do next? Charge us for the air we breathe at Citizens Bank Park?”

Sports leagues are surpassed only by the “Soprano” clan in their ability to squeeze a dollar and cent out of their operations.

Heck, baseball even toyed with the idea of placing advertisements on the bases a few years ago, only to back down in the face of public outcry. The NFL has just banned local television stations from shooting from the sidelines in an effort to protect its broadcast interests, which some critics have claimed could lead to censorship of coverage. Even the LPGA in February placed restrictions on photographs taken by news organizations at its events to curb the use of the images of its players; those were rescinded in mid-March.

“Sports leagues are becoming increasingly concerned with, ‘How can we exclusively control the revenues that flow from our game?’ ” says Rudy Telscher Jr., the attorney for CBC Distribution and Marketing, the plaintiff in the case. “But the question is: Has it gone too far?”

But an MLB.com spokesman says the case is far more complicated than the usage of raw statistics, arguing CBC has capitalized on the usage of the “player stats used in conjunction with their personas” for one purpose: so CBC itself can show a profit.

But you can get statistics for free in the copy of the newspaper you are now holding. No one from baseball has asked newspapers to pay for the privilege of using box scores and such because of the distinction that exists between a company such as CBC and a newspaper. But Telscher argues the statistics newspapers run each day are part of the historical record and as such are in the public domain.

Fantasy leagues have sprouted across America and help fans connect to sports on a personal level.

Things changed in January 2005. MLB Advance Media wrote a check to the MLBPA for $50 million to become the official licensor of fantasy games.

St. Louis attorney J. Bennett Clark understands why baseball is defending itself with such vigor.

“What they have is valuable and they want to control it,” he says. “People will still be able to play in fantasy leagues even if CBC loses, but they will then have to do it on the terms that baseball sets.”

Telscher foresees soaring prices for fantasy players in the event that happens. While the MLBPA last year licensed 18 operators, MLB.com has trimmed that number to five, including goliaths such as Yahoo, ESPN.com and CBS SportsLine. Sources say they paid $2 million for their licenses, fees that could well end up costing an increasing premium.

Clark wonders if baseball is just shooting itself in the foot.

“Somehow you get the feeling that if there was a stone, they would have someone see if there were worms under it to sell,” Clark says. “I would say to baseball, ‘Slow down, boys, because if you alienate the very people who support you, the only thing you will end up with out of this is a black eye.'”