Baseball is my favorite sport to watch and keep up with, I follow baseball during the season and keep up with it even in the off-season. Over the next few weeks leading up to the start of the Major League Baseball season I plan on doing reviews of all the apps that I use, the magazines or books I read on my iPad, and the podcast I follow and listen to on my iPad. This will probably be around a 10 part series and while there are literally thousands of great baseball books and apps that I could talk about I have chosen the few that I personally think are the cream of the crop!
To start off this series I think that I should start with MLB At Bat as I feel that it is the most important baseball app to have on your iPad. My reason for it being #1 is because it gives you everything in one place, plus it is the only app that allows you to watch and listen to games of all your favorite teams.
MLB At Bat 2013 has brought some much need changes to the iPad version of the application. They have finally added all the great features that were in the iPhone version of the app but were missing from the iPad version. Of course the iPhone app still has a few features that the iPad version doesn't have but for the most part they are equal apps.
New in At Bat 2013:
- Multi-platform live audio access for At Bat 13 subscribers (portable to Mac/PC with a valid MLB.com account).
- Universal support for At Bat 13 subscribers, accessible on iPhone, iPad and other supported smart phones and tablets.
- Batting, pitching and fielding statistics.
- Classic games library.
- Re-architected (sic) navigation's.
Of these new features I think the statistics are the most important feature added to the iPad version. Last year I was continually having to use At Bat on my iPhone just to see the stats for players. Not that I mind having to pick up my iPhone but I am an iPad guy and it sucked having to use 2 devices to use 1 application.
The navigation's are also much improved, the changes give At Bat an overall cleaner look and feel to the application. You now have this pop out menu on the left with all your sections of the app available to you. Everything from the News to the Fan Cave. Let’s say you want to view the News section, you can choose to view the MLB news which is all the teams or anything happening in baseball from the WBC stuff to the off the field situations that might be going on. You can also view News by team or even designate a favorite team which will always appear at the to of the drop down in the News section. This is not a new feature but the re-design is much nicer.
Statistics
As I said this was a must needed feature on the iPad version of the application. The stats sections breaks down like this:
- Search by MLB, AL, NL, Batting, Pitching, Fielding, Position, Time-frame, All-Time, Spring Training, Regular Season, World Series, LCS, Division Series, Wild Card, Year.
- Batting Stats
- Pitching Stats
- Fielding Stats
- Historic: All-Time - Batting, Pitching
- Historic: Season - Batting, Pitching
- Player Stats
- Team Stats
As you can see the Statistics section is really robust and even more robust than what was offered in the 2012 iPhone version of At-Bat. They have really went all out this year and you can really tell they put in a lot of work to develop an awesome application and add features that should have been built into this application several years ago.
The Other Sections:
- GAME DAY - This is where you are going to find all the games that are on tap for that day, you can also change the date and go back and check out the box scores, game wrap, plays, and highlights from the previous days games. You can back track all the way to the first game of the season if you wanted.
- Scoreboard - This is where you will find you daily scores for any game that is currently in progress or you will also find who is the playing and what time the game will start at. Another great aspect is you can see which 2 starting pitchers are slated to start the game.
- News - The News section is all the latest happenings in baseball from either the previous day or things that are currently happening around the game. You can view the News section either by MLB which covers the entire league or you can view by the team. The content here is the same content you will find on the mlb.com website or the team website hosted by mlb.com.
- Standings - Want to know what your current teams record is? Want to know how many games out of first place your favorite team is? This is where you will go to find that information.
- Team Schedules - This section is self-explanatory, here you will be able to view the schedules for your favorite team. One of the really great features of this section is you can download your teams schedule to your iPad and it will load it into the calendar app on your iPad which is handy if you want to set up notifications on your calendar.
- MLB Fan Cave - This section is not active as of today, while there are videos and some blog post up that are covering some of the Spring Training stuff this section will not go into full effect until the season actually starts. If you do not know what the MLB Fan Cave is then check out this link:
- 2013 Player Preview - This is a new section to the iPad application and a great one at that. Much like the stats section of the app this is a break down of the top players in the game by ranking. You can view the list by either top 100, top pitchers, top batters, etc.. For a full break down of the Player Preview section please refer to the video above.
At Bat offers a few customization features in the application. You can setup your start screen for whenever you open the application, say you want to set it up to always show the news or the box scores, you have that option. You can also designate a favorite team(s) for the News section of the application, anytime you launch news your favorite team(s) will be affixed to the top of the News drop-down menu and noted with a “star”.
MLB.TV:
Some people are confused about how this app works. Downloading the application for free only gives you access to the News at least it does on iOS. MLB.TV is a subscription that allows you to watch game via the At Bat app the pricing has two tiers broken into four options:
- Basic Yearly: $109.99 / Year
- Basic Monthly: $19.99 / Month
- Premium Yearly: $129.99 / Year
- Premium Monthly: $24.99 / Month
You can also listen to games audio as well if you do not want to stream the games say while you are at the gym or jogging. Now you can also purchase just the audio only portion of the application and this will unlock many more features of the application that the free app without MLB.TV offers. Those prices are as follows:
- $2.99 / Month
- $19.99 / Year
This will unlock the Lite version and allow you listen to games only, you will also get the Game of the Day which is 1 game that you can actually watch via the At Bat application on your device. Are you confused yet? I hope not, I am trying to explain it the best I can but it does seem like a cluster (insert bad word here) as I am reading back what I wrote.
Lite = Free. No audio. No Game of the Day.
At Bat unlock = up to $19.99 for year, audio, 1 Game per day
MLB.TV = up to $129.99 for the year, audio and all games minus blackouts.
If you sign up now for MLB.tv you will also get all the spring training games both the audio and video broadcast of those games. Just keep in mind that not all Spring Training games are broadcast. But enough of them are broadcast to make it worth buying MLB.tv early. I enjoy watching some of the prospect get a chance to face major league hitters or pitchers.
I wanted to mention a feature of the Android version of At Bat, on Android you have a couple of widgets that come with the app, you can setup a mini box-score as a widget on your home screen you can also setup a shortcut to get your favorite team(s) News feed. Really cool feature that I wish was available on my iPad.
Overall this is a fantastic update to an already fantastic application. If you are a baseball fan and you want to follow baseball on a day to day basis or maybe you just want to listen to games while you commute or exercise, the At Bat is the application for you. Honestly, I find myself listening to more games than I actually watch but I do watch my fair share of games during the season. At Bat makes this the perfect app as well as the only app that can accomplish this task.
You can download MLB At Bat in the App Store for free:
MLB At Bat is also available in the Google Play store for Android:
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