As a contributor to this blog who has an unrelated full-time job, I sometimes find it difficult to keep up with all the goings-on in baseball. This is one of the reasons why I decided to purchase AtBat for the iPhone, offered up by MLB.com. The AtBat application is available in the App Store for $14.99, although I don't know if the price will come down later in the season as MLB.com usually does with their PC-based audio and video subscriptions.

Features

I'm not going to write exhaustively about the features. You can check out MLB.com's official description for that.

As I see it, here are the major features:

• Live scoreboard with boxscores, gameday, play-by-play, and video highlights
• Newsfeed from MLB.com (all of the stories from the website are reproduced in the iPhone app)
• Video game-wraps, interviews, news stories
• Video condensed games
• Standings
• Live home and away audio feeds
• One live TV feed per day

The good

• Instant live audio access to any game is great. This works exactly the same as on a desktop computer and can also be played in the background on the iPhone, allowing you to use any other application while the audio continues.
• Every day, MLB selects one game for which a live TV feed can be viewed as part of the AtBat purchase. The video quality is fantastic and this is a great way to watch a game. If you have an MLB.tv subscription, you can access all the video feeds for the games on the iPhone.
• The scoreboard application is generally fine. The boxscores are there as well as the play-by-play. I find the gameday animated feature worthless, but the bottom line is that a live game can be followed.
• The video highlights are awesome. These show up essentially in real time as key plays are added, sometimes as many as 10 per game. You can switch over and watch these video highlights.
• The day after games, condensed games are available. These are great to watch, as long as you are very familiar with the teams. There is no audio play-by-play so player names are not announced.
• Access to the MLB newsfeed is useful.

The bad

• The statistics are really bad. At best, you can get a single page for each player showing a limited number of stats year-to-date and career totals. But you can't get very many stats nor find out even how many years a player has been in the majors. I see no reason why they don't link player names and give at least the option of opening the full player page in the Safari web browser. I find this tremendously annoying because if there's a young player I want to learn more about, I need to put the phone down and go to my computer to look him up. Why not link it all together?
• The newsfeed shows only the 20 most recent stories. If you miss one, you can find it by searching, but you have to know what you're looking for in that case.
• There are no game recaps!! I mean, the recaps all show up as news stories, but you have to hunt for the game you want, and if it's from earlier than yesterday, forget about it because it won't be in the 20 most recent stories. I can't understand why they don't put the recaps right in the scoreboard entry for each game.

The verdict

Overall I give this application a 7/10. For ardent fans, it's a great tool to get real-time access to scores, audio, video, news, and highlights. For fans less familiar with the league and all the players, AtBat leaves something to be desired.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 7:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.