ALL-STAR SCOOP ON INTERNET TV

Doug Yarris is a 49-year-old Yountville dentist sitting in a Mission District flat, a little nervous about leaping off the new media's leading edge as the Internet's next video star. His tentative cyber nom de guerre is "Dr. Doug: Baseball Hunter." The assignment for the man once described as "the Forrest Gump of dentists" is to attend as many of Major League Baseball's All-Star Week events as humanly possible and to "lifecast" his moves to the Internet-watching world.

"Wow," Yarris deadpans, his head drooping with the burden of being cast as possibly the world's first "sports lifecaster." He looks at Justin Kan, the lifecasting pioneer of Justin.tv fame sitting next to him in Kan's flat, tutoring him on the trials of being "on" much of the time. Yarris nods. "There's a lot of responsibility with that."

Dr. Doug -- as his peeps call him -- stands at a media intersection of filmmaking and online culture that most dentists can only dream about. Starting Friday morning during the All-Star FanFest at the Moscone West Convention Center, Dr. Doug will voluntarily submit himself to days and nights of lifecasting -- a process pioneered by Kan's crew of simultaneously filming and uploading to the Internet real-time and unedited footage.

With Major League Baseball's approval, Dr. Doug will be padding around AT&T; Park wearing a baseball cap with a camera affixed to the bill, 6 to 8 hours a day. The camera will be hooked up to a wireless laptop in his backpack which will beam his every utterance -- and those spewing from the Yankee fans around him -- to those who log onto www.sportsjunkie.tv, a new sports lifecasting site whose first offering is "Dr. Doug's Big, Fat All-Star Week Adventure." The idea is that Dr. Doug will serve as the eyes and ears of fans who don't have the cash or connections to get tickets to the festivities. So whether he's watching batting practice, jostling for a homer-catching position in the bleachers or standing in line for a Cha-Cha Bowl, the world will see what Dr. Doug sees.

During live television, the lifecast will be blacked out, but expect those events to be available right after the broadcast. At the end of each night, Dr. Doug will turn the camera on himself, give his observations about the day's events and conduct a live chat with viewers logged onto sportsjunkie.tv.

And his wife's thoughts on lifecasting?

"She wasn't really in favor," Dr. Doug said.

As a consolation to his spouse and patients, he'll be coming home regularly and reshuffling root canal appointments, while maintaining his unpaid night job as an exponent of digital media. There are even plans to park the mobile dental office, in which he regularly treats low-income patients, outside the ballpark. There, willing patients can have their plaque removal lifecast to varied corners of the online universe.

Why Dr. Doug? Why expose oneself to this degree?

Much like the cinematic Gump, he is a magnet for action. As a boy, he was in the stands at Candlestick Park in 1965 when Juan Marichal tangled with catcher John Roseboro of the Los Angeles Dodgers in one of baseball's ugliest brawls, and in 1997 he was ringside in Las Vegas when heavyweight Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear. He found himself in the middle of an ensuing fan brawl.

He's caught 10 balls in the stands, most of them home runs, but his international claim to fame was the one he didn't get: Bonds' homer No. 73 of the 2001 season. That homer set the record for the most home runs in a season and was thought -- at the time -- to be worth $1 million to its owner.

When the ball flew toward the arcade at the Giants' ballpark, Dr. Doug was standing in a thicket of fans near Alex Popov, a Berkeley restaurateur. The ball briefly entered Popov's glove, then cut a path through a swarm of fans and wound up in the hands of Patrick Hayashi, a San Jose marketer.

Popov sued Hayashi for the ball's ownership. His case went to trial, in which there were 15 days of testimony from more than a dozen eyewitnesses, as well as a retired umpire, a $275-an-hour consultant with a doctorate in biomedical engineering, a teenager who claims he was bitten in the struggle and a panel of top legal scholars batting around the ownership rights of "fugitive baseballs." CourtTV provided gavel-to-gavel coverage.

The trial produced a 42-inch-high stack of legal documents and a judge's decision that was remarkably similar to what guys on barstools everywhere suggested: Put the ball up for auction and split the proceeds.

No. 73 netted $450,000 at auction -- $23,500 less than Popov's attorney said he was owed. Hayashi's attorneys waived most of their fees.

First-time Los Gatos filmmaker Mike Wranovics captured the absurdity of the legal proceedings in the 2005 documentary "Up for Grabs," which won the audience award for Best Documentary at the 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival. Aside from the principals, its breakout star was Dr. Doug, who provided eyewitness testimony in the trial and some of the documentary's most humorous bits with his careering, extemporaneous charm.

When Wranovics showed up at Dr. Doug's office in Crockett to interview him for the original documentary, the dentist's schedule was packed. Not wanting to disappoint, he conducted the interview while wrist-deep in a patient's mouth.

Wranovics is now co-founder of sportsjunkie.tv, and this spring, after meeting with Justin.tv founder Kan, started talking to Dr. Doug about lifecasting -- or, in this case, "eventcasting" -- the All-Star Game for his new site.

"Dr. Doug has a childlike quality about him that makes him so watchable," Wranovics said.

In turn, Dr. Doug feels he has the energy to be "on" all lifecast long. "Because I'm a dentist all day, I'm used to being 'on' all day, talking to people," Dr. Doug said.

Kan said the evolution of live online video is all about introducing real people into the media market. In late May, Kan introduced to his network a new 24/7 lifecaster - Justine, a 23-year-old graphic designer from Pittsburgh. Now, she's drawing more traffic than Justin. "Hey, she's an attractive young blond woman," he said and shrugged. "Who would you rather watch?"

Kan's company has supplied Dr. Doug with his lifecasting equipment, and on July 16 it plans to open its network for anyone to open up his or her own lifecasting channel. In turn, sportsjunkie.tv plans to offer other lifecasts of sporting events.

"I've been saying for two months that I will be eclipsed by people who are more attractive, more charismatic than me," Kan said.

As Kan sits next to Dr. Doug on the digital edge that is Kan's couch, Dr. Doug had a final question: How durable is this lifecasting equipment?

"Because," said Dr. Doug, eyes widening, "I'm going for the ball."