New York ? Is “frags per round” going to be the batting average of the 21st century?

Professional computer gamers – and a growing number of corporate sponsors – certainly hope so.

Players of Counter Strike, a popular title in competition at the U.S. finals of the World Cyber Games last week, count their prowess in how many enemies they can shoot to pieces, or “fragment,” in a frantic two-minute round of virtual gunplay.

Time and demographics, boosters say, argue for video game tourneys becoming the next big spectator sport in the United States, where more than 108 million Americans now play computer games, according to the Yankee Group.

They’re already garnering big-name sponsors.

“Kids in the early 1900s were playing baseball in dirt fields. Kids today are playing computer games,” says Jason Lake, an Atlanta real-estate lawyer who owns two teams of pro gamers, totaling 14 players, some of whom did battle last week.

Lake is being joined in ownership circles by some big-name players.

Last week, McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals, the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that makes Tylenol, announced it was sponsoring Ouch!, a six-man Counter Strike team.

It is believed to be the first time a non-computer company has sponsored a U.S. video game team.

Trevor Schmidt, who runs Gotfrag.com, notes that Burger King sponsors games in Germany. He thinks the United States is six to eight months away from seeing major video game sponsorship deals by consumer-goods companies.

Stevo Van, 16, foreground, member of the dedicate5 team, of St. Petersburg, Fla., plays alongside teammates in the World Cyber Games Regional Qualifiers. Video games tournaments - like this Aug. 6 event in Miami - are attracting sponsors.

Robert Krakoff – president Razer Group, which makes computer mice and is a major sponsor of the games, along with Intel Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. – figures U.S. advertisers will have to get into the game, as other forms of advertising lose their grip on young men.

“Corporations are dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on a TV ad, and kids don’t even watch TV,” says Lake, the team owner. “They’re missing this demographic.”

For a nongamer, last week’s gaming competition at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom couldn’t have looked too exciting.

Pale young men crowded around computers on the floor as the cyberspace-based action unfolded on big-screen displays overhead, accompanied by a play-by-play announcer rattling off things like, “Schwan’s gonna be hiding behind a big box there, waiting for them to come up, and it’s 7-0 for the counterterrorists on this map.”

Only about 4,000 spectators showed up at the Hammerstein, organizers said, but more than 63,000 followed the games live on the Web.

Even more significantly, more than a million people around the world have tried to qualify for the final, scheduled for November in Singapore. That’s mostly a sign of the acceptance that computer gaming – or e-sports, as promoters like to call the movement – has gained in the rest of the world.

Americans accounted for only 40,000 of the prospective competitors.

But in South Korea, where the World Cyber Games is based, three cable channels broadcast competitive gaming around the clock and some of the country’s approximately 200 professional gamers bask in rock star-like fame.

For all the optimism, several hurdles must be overcome if e-sports are to become a mass phenomenon – in the United States and elsewhere.

For one, the violent game content can be a put-off both to spectators and advertisers. To the gamers themselves, the mayhem on the computer screen doesn’t count as real violence. Apart from the occasional case of wrist-wracking carpal tunnel syndrome, no one gets hurt.

“It’s not really even looked at as violent or shooting,” Lake says. “It’s more about teamwork, like soccer or football.”

Another hurdle is the very technology that enables these games. Manufacturers keep putting out new games and game consoles, rendering the old obsolete.

“You have to relearn every year,” says Matija Biljeskovic, who competes in pixelated FIFA Soccer. “The way the players recover the ball, the timings, it all changes.”

Lastly, watching the games isn’t all that enjoyable for people who haven’t personally played the particular games.

“In older generations … I don’t think this is ever going to have mainstream appeal,” Lake says.

For now, video gaming is not a road to riches for the players.

McNeil would not say how much it is paying Ouch!, but Schmidt estimates the average player on a successful team makes $30,000 to $40,000 a year, mostly from sponsorships and excluding prize money.

Perhaps 50 gamers in the United States are at that level.

Biljeskovic doesn’t make that much, since his game doesn’t appeal to U.S. sponsors. If his existence is any measure, the life of a semipro video gamer doesn’t quite match that of a pro baseball player or rock star in glamour.

The 21-year-old studies electrical engineering at Northern Illinois University and is a single father. He practices after he puts his 3-year-old daughter to bed at 9 p.m.

When Biljeskovic tells women that he’s a serious video gamer, they’re not necessarily excited. But then he tells them that gaming competitions have taken him to Switzerland, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“They go ‘Oh wow, that’s awesome!’ And of course they ask me to take them with me to Switzerland,” he says.

Biljeskovic went on last week to win the U.S. final in FIFA Soccer, which means he’ll be part of Team USA in November in Singapore.