I’m a baseball fan. Admittedly, I haven’t always been. My father wasn’t a big sports guy, so growing up the television was never on the game, and we never went to our hometown team’s stadium, which for us was the legendary Fenway Park.
Today, I’d give my eye teeth to be at Fenway right now, but unfortunately, time and money constraints stop me from moving across the country for a few months out of the year. Fortunately, I can still get my Red Sox fix wherever I go, thanks to MLB.Com at Bat for the iPhone. Let’s go out to a ballgame after the jump.
Any Team, Your Team
Let’s say you’re a Red Sox fan like myself and you’re over 2,000 miles from Fenway Park. Or say you’re a (shudder) Yankees fan who lives in Florida and can’t catch the games on your local network. MLB.Com at Bat lets you pick any team in the MLB as your team, and you can follow their stats, schedule and box scores all for free. Plus, if you want more, you can pay for it, too.
Check out a game as it happens, or see what's coming up.
The 2012 version of the app has a few improvements to the 2011 version, but the most notable one is the price. Last year, it was over $10 to buy the app, and then you didn’t get all of the features that you could want. Today, the app itself is free, bringing you the important stuff that you want to know as a fan, and it doesn’t cost you a thing. That’s huge in my book.
Setting Up
Once you’re in the app, you can establish who your favorite team(s) are, and who you want to follow. For example, although I’m a Red Sox fan, I want to keep up to date on my local team, the Arizona Diamondbacks and my wife’s hometown team, the San Diego Padres. By adding them to my Favorites list (accessible via the More button on the main screen) I can catch up anytime I want.
Although you can't stream games with the free app, you can watch video highlights.
Additionally, you can enter in your MLB.com account information. This ties your iPhone with your MLB.com account, which we’ll get into more later.
Accessing Your Team
Once a favorite team is established, the app will then load into that team’s main page every time you open it up (if you have multiple teams, it loads into the last one that was open when you turned off the app). By default, you’ll see what game is playing today, who’s pitching, a Game Preview, stats, news and so on. You can even get tickets if you want, just by pressing the ticket button. There’s also a sliding date bracket above the main box that you can flip back and forth to see future or past match ups.
If your team is playing, then you’re given the option to view MLB Gameday, video or audio of the game. But unless you’re signed into an MLB.com account and have an MLB.TV subscription, these are pretty much dead ends. Why?
Additional Costs
MLB.com At Bat is ultimately a way to get you to subscribe to MLB.TV, the MLB’s way to bring you coverage of games and events that you might not otherwise see. Prior to 2012, the app itself cost over $10, and then you had to subscribe to MLB.TV for $100+ a year just to get videos streaming to your iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, that was still a heck of a deal for a real fan — I did it, and so did thousands of others. Today though, the app itself is free, and all the add-ons are done as in-app purchases.
What it looks like if you want to stream a game.
This is absolutely an occasion where I’m fine with the IAP process because not only has the MLB made it easier to do than usual, they’ve also broken down the pricing pretty nicely. For $14.99 (or $2.99 a month), you pay for At Bat 12. This gives you all the same info that the app usually does, as well as live radio, stats, in-game highlights, Gameday pitch tracking and so on. That’s not a bad deal, but it’s kind of the short end of the stick if you’re a hardcore MLB fan. You probably want streaming video, and for that, it’s more.
Pricing for the app isn't bad, but it's worth it to upgrade if you want the streaming games.
For $27.99 a month you get MLB.TV Premium, which gets you all the stuff from At Bat 12 as well as live games in HD on the iPad, iPhone and Apple TV, plus any other device you own that can stream the Internet connection. All the details can be found on their site, and it can get quite complex. One thing to note: The app itself says that MLB.TV Premium runs $27.99/mo, but the website says $24.99. I can’t find any info on why the discrepancy, I’m just assuming it’s just a typo.
The Final Out
Now the big question: Is MLB.com at Bat for you?
This is a baseball fan’s app, that’s for sure. If you’re just a casual viewer of whatever team happens to be playing, then you might not find any advantage in having up to the minute scores or updates — that’s just not your thing. But if you are a fan, this is a must have. It’s everything you need to access your team wherever you are, whenever you want.
Admittedly, you should probably get an MLB.TV subscription to really reap the benefits of the app, because that’s when it truly comes alive. That may seem like a bummer to some, but if you’re a hardcore fan, you’ll definitely see the advantage.