This is a short guide for circumventing the regional blackouts as well as national blackouts when a game one wants to watch is going to be featured on ESPN or FOX. To start with, you'll find a map that refers to MLB's regional blackouts here.

For this guide, I'll be using Firefox and an add-on called FoxyProxy that can be downloaded here; there's also a version that works with Google Chrome. Install that into Firefox, and come back to this when you're done.

More after the jump.

For this example, we're going to get around a FOX national broadcast, so we'll need to pick an IP address that's not in the United States. So go to http://hidemyass.com/proxy-list/, and pick your favorite country that's not the United States; but also try to find one that has a fast connection speed and a fast connection time. Anonymity doesn't really matter for this (we're not really breaking any laws here), but better's always good for a lot of reasons.

Brazil's nice this time of year. We'll use an IP address from there. So, based on the selections that were made, we end up with a list that looks kinda like this:

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You generally want to go with the most recently updated link, so this time we'll pick the one at the top of the list, and we go to (In Firefox) Tools -> FoxyProxy, and select "Options", as in the screenshot below:

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Clicking "Options" will bring up a new dialog box that you can create your proxy with. First you'll see a list of existing proxies that have been created (if there are any), and to the right you'll see a button that reads "Add New Proxy". Click that, and the dialog box will expand and you'll be able to paste the IP address and port number that hidemyass.com supplied into the dialog.

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Click OK, then you'll be able to name your new proxy setup, as well as set some more options if you like.

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Click OK again, and you'll see your new proxy location in the listview in the main dialog. You can just click "Close" now, because we're done with the hard part.

Now you can test your new proxy.

Go back to Tools -> FoxyProxy, and select your new proxy out of the dropdown list, as below:

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Once it's got a check beside it, the proxy is live. Go to a website that you know will be live (I generally use google.com, because it loads fast and you'll know pretty quickly if there's anything wrong). If you're using a foreign proxy, you'll know immediately if it works, because the URL in the address bar will change to the country-specific TLD, as in the example below:

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See the "www.google.co.br"? That means we're in good shape. Now you can enjoy some baseball.

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This concludes our presentation. Don't forget to tip your waitress.