The start of spring also means the start of the Major League Baseball season. This past Monday was the official opening day of the 2009 season, one which will bring great changes to New York’s two ball clubs, the Yankees and the Mets. Both teams officially inaugurated play at their brand-new New York City stadiums this week, opening a new chapter on the history of the sport in New York.

Aside from being gorgeous, luxurious and probably a bit too expensive, both the new Yankee Stadium and Citi Field, the Mets’ new ballpark, are bringing baseball into the 21st century. There are certainly plenty of ordinary-yet-impressive technological features, such as Yankee Stadium’s 6,000-square foot center field display, but what’s really exciting in these new stadiums is the spread of wireless networking to all areas of the stadiums.

This is a huge revolution in the baseball-watching experience, as it allows the teams to leverage the growing army of wifi-ready mobile devices to provide a better experience for spectators. MLB’s Advanced Media group has already been doing some amazing work with interactive features. All team websites are integrated with the league’s “Gameday” feature that lets you watch the game through a series of updating charts — baseball is a statistics-laden game, and features like this really let you experience it.

They also succeeded in bringing some of this magic to the iPhone with MLB At Bat, an application for sale through the App Store that lets you follow all ongoing games with video highlights and an optimized version of the same chart-base of Gameday interface from the web. For the iPhone-less, the mobile version of mlb.com and accompanying team websites do a good job of providing much of the same functionality for less capable devices.

Now, given what can already be done off the field, imagine what a persistent Internet connection could do in the ballpark itself. Whenever I go to a game, I always shell out for a program at the gate. This magazine-type publication not only serves as a convenient scorecard, but is also full of vital information, including rosters for the visiting teams and statistics like recent batting averages. Since it’s a magazine, the statistics are almost always out of date, unless you happen to go to a game very close to the program’s print date. However, with access to a mobile application like At Bat, all of the statistics and rosters will be up-to-date, and extra content like relevant news headlines can be pushed out as the game goes on.

This, of course, doesn’t even begin to break the surface of all the things that are possible with in-stadium Internet. The team could easily push out an app that would allow chat amongst people in the ballpark, or one that would allow you to skip the line at the concession stand and order an overpriced hot dog from your seat. In the past, this would have been prohibitively expensive to implement, but now that most people are carrying a powerful mobile computer in their pockets, the sky’s the limit. I’m looking forward to attending games this season to see what’s in store.