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MLB has returned to the App Store again this year  with the At Bat app which allows you to listen to live streaming audio from literally any game from Opening Day through the end of the World Series with absolutely no blackout restrictions unlike TV where sometimes you just never know if you’ll get to see your game or not.  Read on for more!

Pregame

When you first load the app, you are presented with a list of today’s games.  If the game has not yet started, it will show you the time the game is scheduled.  Tap on the blue arrow and you get some detailed preview info such as starting pitchers, records, and also local TV and radio broadcast information.

Game Time

At last, it’s finally game time!

Here we see our new home screen now that all of our games are in progress.  Just as before you can tap anywhere on your game and you can see the score, pitcher, batter, and count all in a little preview window. (By the way for the curious, Mike Fontenot blew it and got the 2nd out here.)

If you tap on either the audio button at the top or the yellow headphones icon in the game preview you will be presented with our next screenshot.  Here you can select the audio feed from either team and when you hit play.  As with any other internet audio stream, it must connect and buffer a bit but on wi-fi it started playing in no more than 2 seconds.

Next we’ll take a look at the detailed live game data.  Here is the main Gameday screen that will load after you select your game.  You see live pitch data and play by play information below that.  I have found that the “live” part of this can sometimes be spotty and sometimes require you to either open a new game then reopen your game or sometimes relaunch the app entirely.  For the most part it is fairly stable since version 1.0.1 however I think that there is still room for improvement here.

The Field screen is next up.  Just as with the Gameday screen, you get live score and count information so you can see that here, Mike Fontenot is ahead. ;)

Below that you can select if you want to see both teams or just offense or just defense.  For the offense, you would see the current batter, the next 2 batters up, and anybody on base which the Cubs struggled with that night so I couldn’t get a shot of that.

Other than that there isn’t a whole lot else to this screen.  I find it most useful when you have multiple players switching around so you can see who is going where.

I’ll be honest here, I’m not a diehard baseball nut like some people are.  I personally will not use this next page much however up next we have the game box score complete with live updates.

Here you can see that Mike Fontenot is outlined in yellow.  I will admit this is luck but just as I took this screenshot the page was live updating to show that Fontenot grounded out.  You can only view the box score for one team at a time so to switch to the Brewers you must tap on their name up at the top to toggle their score.

The game summary screen is great if you are joining a game in progress.  Where the Box Score page is divided by team, this page is divided by all plays and only scoring plays.

Here you see the Scores mode.  You are presented with the inning of the play and a short description of the play and a running score after the play is over.

In Plays Mode, you are presented with smaller buttons numbered 1-9 representing the innings.  If you are watching a game in progress, anything not yet played will not show a number on it’s respective button.  Earlier I mentioned that I know Mike Fontenot grounded out in the top of the 8th.  I actually know this because I was able to look it up here as I was working on the review the afternoon after the game.

Here is one of my other complaints about this app.  There is no live video.  CBS spoiled me this year by streaming live NCAA March Madness On Demand video to the iPhone, and for half the price of the MLB At Bat application.

What we do get instead is video clip updates so if you were listening to the game in the top of the 5th and heard Milton Bradley’s home run, they give you a chance to actually see the home run.  These updates are “live” where they are not posted as it happens how
ever you don’t have to wait until the end of the game to see it.  As videos are posted, the red badge on the Videos tab will update to reflect the updates.

Personally, I wish we got live streaming video like MMoD from CBS however, we are already getting a great price on this appliction, more on that in a minute.

Settings
The one thing that was odd to me was I could never seem to find any way to change the settings of this appliction.  Coming from a Windows world, I’m used to each app having a settings button somewhere in the app.  I finally figured out that you can get to it by going to the main iPhone settings and then you can access the settings from there.  While I knew that many apps put settings there I just never thought to check it so it was more negligence on my part.  Some of you may have noticed the little star next to the Cubs on the app’s main screen which shows all the games.  There aren’t many things you can tweak but you can designate a favorite team which will bump that game up to the top and all the rest are sorted by start time.  There are only a few other tweaks you can make and those are:

• Update Frequency
• Video Playback Scaling
• Auto-Lock
• Time Zone defaults

I honestly don’t believe that you need anything else other than that because if you start letting people customize colors and making various UI changes then you start adding un-needed code which could add the instability you would find more often in a Windows Mobile app. ;) (I kid, I’m a Win Mo convert)

Wrap-Up
To be completely honest this ended up being a lot longer than I had initially planned but there is just so much to this app to write about that I didn’t really know what I was getting into for my first ever published review.  I think I may just be trying too hard but I really love the iPhone (for the most part).

As I mentioned a little bit ago, I feel like this app is a great value.  To get live game audio on your PC or Mac , you will have to pay $14.95 per year.  The MLB At Bat application is only $9.99 which, to me, is an incredible value over the PC/Mac streaming especially when I can listen to my game anywhere via the 3G data connection.  So despite a few minor issues I feel like this is a great app for any baseball fan from the casual follower to the diehard Cubs and Yankees fans to the statistics junkies.  For those who don’t want/need streaming audio there is also a free version that has all the above features with the exception of the Gameday streaming audio.

I feel like this app is solid enough and useful enough to warrant a spot on the first page on my iPhone home screen and a 4.5 / 5 rating.

MLB At Bat 2009 – $9.99
MLB At Bat Lite – Free