Gallery: Baseball Apps: The 7 Best Downloads for MLB Fanatics
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The 2012 Major League Baseball season has begun in full force: Opening night was Wednesday, opening day is today, and the A’s and Mariners were even able to play two official games in Japan last week. The upshot? Baseball fans now have the next six months to obsessively track stats, manage fantasy teams, and cheer for their favorite players. Whether you’re a diehard fan of a local team or a numbers junkie who records scores of every game, you can make the next half a year even better with the help of key mobile apps. Baseball is the perfect sport to track on your smartphone -- the game is just slow enough so you can look away for a while without missing a crucial run or stolen base. And, no, football fans, the preceding sentence was not an invitation to rip into baseball. With so many Major League baseball games -- 162 per team, to be exact -- you’ll get a lot of mileage out of these apps. Here are the seven best baseball apps to keep you satisfied from opening day to the last out of the World Series. (MLB At Bat 12, our first pick, above.)
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MLB.com At Bat -------------- MLB’s official iOS and Android app is a must-download for all baseball fans. You can access basic information including scores, news from MLB.com, schedules, rosters, and team standings at no cost. There’s also a video library of free clips and player interviews. All of this is presented in an easy-to-navigate interface -- you can even customize the home screen to feature your favorite team (this feature is not available on the iPad or iPod touch). But what makes the app shine are its paid features: For $14.99 for the season or $2.99 per month, you get access to pitch-by-pitch updates, video highlights from games in progress, live radio broadcasts, and more. What’s more, the iPad app is optimized to take advantage of Apple’s new 9.7-inch Retina Display. While $14.99 per season might seem like a lot of pay for a mere app, you get a lot for your money. And if you already have an MLB.TV subscription, you can access all of the premium features at no additional cost. Plus, you’ll be able to watch live games from the app and access videos of archived games for later viewing. Free; available for [iOS](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mlb.com-at-bat/id493619333?mt=8) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bamnetworks.mobile.android.gameday.atbat2012.full)
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EvriThing Baseball ------------------ If you have an RSS feed for baseball news or your Instapaper Read Later list is filled with baseball-related articles, you might find a better solution in EvriThing Baseball. The app pulls baseball news from various sources -- thousands of them, according to the Evri developers -- and compiles everything in a single go-to app. The app breaks down news into more than 30 channels: General Baseball News, Trade Talk, Roster Moves, Injury Report, Free Agents, and one channel for every MLB team. When you tap on a channel, the app takes you to a feed of the latest news. You can customize the order in which channels appear on the app’s homepage to your favorite team or topic. (I have the San Francisco Giants topping my list.) The app updates your feeds constantly, but you can also pull down to refresh a channel as well. For each story, you’ll see the source, publish time, headline, and a two-line excerpt of the article. The app also compiles a mini slideshow of relevant images for each channel. Depending on the source, once you tap on a story you’ll see it either displayed in its entirety in a reader-friendly format (stripped of images and ads), in its entirety on the source’s website, or as an excerpt with a link to the story’s original site. Having to read stories in the latter two formats is the biggest drawback to EvriThing Baseball, but for a free app, the content quality far outweighs its feature flaws. Free; [available for iOS](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/evrithing-baseball/id375215564?mt=8)
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FanGraphs Baseball ------------------ FanGraphs Baseball goes the extra step for hardcore fans obsessed with statistics. In addition to live box scores for every game of the season, and life-time stats for every major league player from 1974 to present day, the app provides real-time win probability graphs -- visual snapshots that show the probability of one team winning over another, all based on plays in the field, as they happen. This is the ultimate numbers-packed app for anyone interested in the minutia of team and player tracking. You can dig deep into statistics throughout a player’s career, including minor league stats, contract values, and salary histories. All of the graphs and charts are well-organized, and while the neon green color scheme doesn’t make for the prettiest U.I., everything is easy to understand. If you’re not quite a stat geek yet, no worries: FanGraphs offers a glossary explaining every abbreviation and term that appears in its diagrams. $3; [available for iOS](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fangraphs-baseball/id331036353?mt=8)
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Fantasy Monster Pro ------------------- Fantasy baseball is like Dungeons and Dragons for sports fans, one friend recently told me. Another friend said managing a fantasy baseball team is as much work as managing an actual real-world squad. Whatever the analogy, the need to know where one’s fantasy team stands at any given moment makes mobile team management apps ideal. While you can get a free ESPN or Yahoo fantasy app, Fantasy Monster Pro gives you access to all of your fantasy sports teams in one, feature-packed download. For baseball, you can edit and set up both your Yahoo and ESPN team lineups, check live scores, trade players, check weekly match-ups, view standings and rosters, read player news, and more. The app is the most comprehensive fantasy league app we could find, and lets you live out all of your sports fantasies wherever you go. And when you aren’t checking your baseball player stats, you can always use Fantasy Monster Pro to keep track of your fantasy football, basketball, or hockey team. The app itself is straightforward, and even gives you a pretty, sport-specific background while you’re managing your fantasy team -- for fantasy baseball, the motif is home plate. $4.99; available for [iOS](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fantasy-monster-pro-yahoo/id371000743?mt=8) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bignoggins.fantasymonster.pro&hl=en)
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GameChanger Baseball Scorekeeping --------------------------------- There are quite a few scorekeeping apps available for iOS, but GameChanger stands out because it’s intuitive and free. While it caters more to amateur scorekeeping, the app can easily be used for recording MLB team and game scores as well. You can add and save teams directly in the app, or by using the GameChanger website. The great thing about the app is that it provides step-by-step tutorials for scorekeeping and lineup management, so if you know nothing about baseball scorekeeping, you can learn quickly with GameChanger. You do all your scorekeeping on a virtual, interactive baseball field. For example, you tap the Pitch button (on the pitcher’s mound) to start an at-bat, and the app opens a menu for you to choose the appropriate pitch result (Ball, Called Strike, Swing & Miss, Foul Ball, etc.). Everything is reflected in real-time on a scoreboard at the top of the app. If you make your team public, other GameChanger users can follow your scorekeeping -- a great feature if you’re the scorekeeper for a Little League team whose players’ parents want to keep up with a game in progress. The app will also generate player and team stats as you score, which you can access on the GameChanger website. Free; available for [iOS](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gamechanger-baseball-scorekeeping/id318906314?mt=8) and [beta for Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.gamechanger)
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Ballpark Envi ------------- If you’re into photos of ballparks -- and a lot of them -- you’ll love Ballpark Envi, a comprehensive app with images and seating charts of every current MLB baseball stadium. The most interesting parts of the app, however, are the photo collections of past ballparks such as Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, Seals Stadium in San Francisco, and the first Yankee Stadium in New York. Each stadium has between eight to two dozen photos shot by professional photographers. The photos automatically play in a slideshow format. If you’ve never been to a particular ballpark, you’ll get a good sense of how it looks and feels by browsing Ballpark Envi. The biggest flaw with the app is that it’s somewhat slow to load images. You’ll most likely want to go into your iDevice settings to disable all of the slideshow transitions, as they just make viewing images even slower. For the price, it’s worth having these pretty and organized photos at your fingertips -- they’re perfect for browsing during the seventh-inning stretch. $0.99; [available for iOS](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ballpark-envi/id318129329?mt=8)
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Baseball Legends ---------------- When you aren’t watching a game, why not pass the time testing your ballgame knowledge? Baseball Legends challenges you with more than 1,150 baseball-related questions covering everything from baseball history to current events. The first question posed to me: What was SF Giants’ Barry Zitto’s salary for 2012? (The answer is a ridiculous $19 million.) The app offers two playing modes: Regular Mode and Time Trials. Regular Mode gives you 10 seconds to answer each question, while Time Trials lets you answer as many questions as you can in 90 seconds. The range of questions and the difficulty level caters toward people who really love the game -- you won’t find questions about simple rules. I only wish the app had a versus or team playing mode, so I could play against friends and family. $0.99; [available for iOS](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/baseball-legends/id413370392?mt=8)
