Ah, springtime! That time of year when a young man’s fancy turns to…. Baseball! As we pause briefly in the regular season to give the venerable Yankee Stadium a fitting tribute during this year’s All-Star game, MLB.com has delivered to the App Store an application to keep track of your favorite teams as they play the second half of the season.
OVERVIEW
MLB At Bat can best be described as a heavily stripped-down version of MLB.com, providing the basics of games in progress and completed games, along with video highlights from each game. For $4.99, baseball fans can view all of the games for the “rest of the season” – bringing to mind the question of whether or not this will prove to be a yearly charge.
GAME SUMMARIES
When you first open the app, you are presented with a list of games and their scores. Tapping a game will change the box score at the bottom of the list to reflect the selected game. The current batter, pitcher, and a diamond bases graphic along with the current balls, strikes, and outs appear below the box score. The application appears to refresh once per minute – which is slower than MLB.com’s mobile site – and thus the balls/strikes count is almost a moot point since you rarely get to see those stats updated more than once per batter.
This, however, is about it. You cannot see the pitch-by-pitch graphic that is one of the MLB.com mobile site’s great features. Likewise, there are no batting stats for each team (how many hits each player had in how many at-bats, for example), nor can you see overall standings (for the AL East, for example). For that, you must click the globe that appears in the extreme lower right corner of the screen, which will take you to MLB.com’s mobile site in Safari, which has all that, and more, such as baseball news. The globe is pretty tricky to tap properly — at least, it is for me — meaning that it took me a while to find this feature (and I did so by accident).
VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS
The real selling point of this app, however, is the video highlights. By clicking on the video icon to the right of each game’s score, you can see a list of available video clips (which are added as the game progresses – a nice touch). Tapping on a clip brings the clip up in the iPhone’s landscape movie viewer (just like YouTube or iPod movie clips).
However, there is a critical failing here. Like YouTube, MLB has two versions of each clip – “high bandwidth” and “low bandwidth”; and, like YouTube, you only get the “high bandwidth” version when you’re connected via WiFi. Even though 3G speeds have proven to be impressive, the iPhone still presents the low-bandwidth version when connected via 3G as it does with Edge.
Now, on YouTube this is not usually terrible – but MLB has apparently compressed the video on their low-bandwidth clips to the point that they are painful to watch. Here are some screen shots comparing the same clip in both high and low bandwidth (click the images for a better view):
While the difference is less noticeable on these still frames, the difference is painfully obvious while the video is playing. You can get a general idea of how pixelated the video is by comparing the text at the top of the screen.
SUMMARY
There’s no compelling reason to purchase MLB At Bat unless you really want the ability to view video highlights and plan to do so on WiFi. Otherwise, the MLB.com mobile site (http://wap.mlb.com) provides much more information and is free. If the low-bandwidth video quality was somewhat higher – or even if a 3G connection allowed you to view the high-bandwidth video – I could recommend this app. However, until and unless they do improve the app substantially, you may want to avoid it, especially since it appears to be a yearly subscription instead of a one-time fee.
WHAT I’D LIKE TO SEE
MLB.com could improve this application in so many ways, it’s hard to know where to start. Besides the obvious video quality improvements, I’d like to see standings (including the Wild Card), a “Top Plays” section with the outstanding plays from all teams, more of the in-game data from the MLB.com mobile site (such as the excellent pitch location and call data). Finally, extending a current Gameday Audio subscription from MLB.com would be the icing on the cake. My guess is that MLB was compelled to rush this application to completion to be ready in time for the App Store launch and thus had to eliminate features – as indeed it seems like many developers had to do. Hopefully, they come out with a more robust version soon.
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Critical Info
Developer: MLB.com
Availability: iTunes App Store (Sports Category)
Price: $4.99, likely per year.
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