Tracking Major League Baseball, a Perfect Sport for an App
By BOB TEDESCHI
Apps for football, basketball or hockey fans suffer from a nagging built-in problem: who wants to stop watching the game to take in more information through the app?
Nascar fans can at least take a quick break and sift through some ancillary racing data without missing too much action. And then there’s Major League Baseball.
If ever a sport was built for a mobile app companion, this is it. Between pitches you can watch a batter step out of the batter’s box, adjust his jock strap and spit four times, or you can check a mobile app for useful information about the game or league.
The people at MLB.com, Major League Baseball’s interactive division, seem to understand this implicitly, and they were the first of the major sports leagues — or the major media companies, for that matter — to produce a stellar app.
MLB’s AtBat (for Apple and Android), which comes in a free limited version and a full-featured $15 version, is now in its fifth season, and returns with a few nice refinements to complement a core of fun and useful features from years past.
With the free version, you get live scoring in a nicely designed package. But that’s all. If your budget permits only free apps, you can get more, and better, information from ScoreMobile (on Android and Apple), but more on that later.
AtBat12 subscribers who pay the $15 season pass (or $3 monthly), receive a long list of goodies that will appeal to home users as well as those who attend live games.
With the audio feature, for instance, you can listen to live and away broadcasts, with no blackout restrictions. Live video covers all out-of-market games.
The video presentation is filled with intelligent flourishes, especially for iPads. You can watch the game with a box score over part of the screen, and press a player’s name to see his detailed stats, or press a button to hide the ancillary graphics.
For my money, the app’s coolest feature is in the Gameday section, which includes box scores, video highlights and an animated, pitch-by-pitch game simulation from the catcher’s point of view.
Those elements are all nicely designed, too. The ballparks are shown with lifelike detail, for instance, and video highlight buttons appear in a discreet corner. When pressed, the video occupies just enough of an iPad’s screen to let you see the clip, while the pitch-by-pitch action continues on the rest of the screen.
But Gameday’s “Pitch-f/x” feature is the main event. It shows the actual trajectory of each pitch shortly after it is thrown, so you can see a pitch’s speed and its path — down to the precise location of the break in a curveball.
Ardent fans will have a field day with this feature. You can see exactly why a late-breaking pitch is so hard to hit, or, conversely, why a pitcher’s last three hanging curveballs were crushed to the left-center gap.
It’s the sort of information that armchair managers can use to track the inner workings of a game and call the next pitch or predict the next best personnel move.
Unfortunately, MLB AtBat users must wait until the regular season to see this feature, since spring training ballparks aren’t generally outfitted with pitch-tracking equipment.
Another app, Draft Kit 2012: Front Office Baseball for iPhone ($3), from Bloomberg Sports, shows how extensively this sport is being targeted by major media companies.
The app provides a fantasy manager’s dashboard, featuring multiple draft lists, tools for tracking players that have already been drafted and other tools for sorting players according to your specifications.
Draft Kit also links to fantasy rosters that are hosted on Yahoo, CBSSports.com and ESPN.com, and offers a recommendation engine that rates players in the draft and offers a trade analyzer.
Some users have complained about the app’s suggested rankings for fantasy players. One can certainly quibble with any rankings, but Bloomberg’s criteria seem fair enough.
The app is nearly identical in scope to the Web edition of Bloomberg’s Front Office, which costs $20 per season, with a free limited version. In app form, though, the data is harder to absorb at a glance.
ScoreMobile is another great option for fantasy league participants, as well as baseball fans who don’t belong to a fantasy league. The app, which is free, covers a wide range of sports, but its baseball coverage is especially strong.
ScoreMobile offers news from Rotowire, a rotisserie-league specialist, and fantasy managers can load rosters and track their progress as games unfold.
Fans who don’t participate in those leagues will still appreciate ScoreMobile’s “base runner diamond” feature, which lets you quickly check the score, base runners and outs for any active game. (That feature starts on Opening Day.)
The app also offers betting odds and alerts for the start and end of games, bases-loaded situations and close games, among others.
It would be an impressive lineup of services for any app, but the fact that it’s free makes this a can’t-miss kid.
