The Good
- Easy-to-view standings page
- Integrates with Twitter
- Free
The Bad
- Distracting ads
- Search functionality is glitchy
There’s a huge market for iPhone baseball apps -- at last count, the App Store features nearly 500 apps related to baseball. As a result, competition is pretty fierce. Pro Baseball Live! (Plusmo Inc, Free) does a lot of things well, but MLB.com At Bat Lite is a better option if you’re in the market for a free baseball app.
Pro Baseball Live: Easy-to-view standings
The Pro Baseball Live! app makes it easy to track current standings for both the American and National Leagues. The chart is simple and easy to read at a glance, at least for me, but someone with poor eyesight may have trouble reading the small numbers. Pro Baseball Live! also includes a photo gallery with lengthy captions and a news section. News articles don’t include photos, which would be a nice touch, but it appears that they are updated at least once a day.
Another cool thing about Pro Baseball Live! is the Twitter integration. When applicable, the app displays baseball-related tweets from sports journalists at the top of the screen. This is a quick way to keep up on baseball news without reading full-length articles.
A few glitches
Pro Baseball Live! also lets you track MLB news and scores for your favorite teams. The search functionality is a little glitchy, however. If you search for an entire team name (Chicago Cubs or Arizona Diamondbacks, for example), you’ll get no results. You have to search for either the city or the team name, but not both, to get results. Strange.
Once you get past the glitchy search, the tracker works well. It shows each selected team, along with their current record and next game. Clicking on the team name takes you to the info page with complete rosters, news, and photos. However, for every team I checked, there were no news articles listed on their individual pages. You'll have to go to the main news page for that.
Pro Baseball Live! includes advertisements, which come in the form of banner ads at the bottom of the screen. You can’t blame a free app for containing ads -- they have to make money somehow, right? -- but some of the ads are a little much. There’s one ad for “local singles” that contains four pictures, which can be a little distracting when you’re scrolling through the tiny numbers in the Standings tab. The other ads I encountered weren’t quite as distracting.
The Bottom Line
For a free iPhone app, Pro Baseball Live! does a pretty good job of displaying the latest baseball news, scores, and standings. It’s certainly not the slickest iPhone app and there are a few glitches, but I like the Twitter integration. Pro Baseball Live! is not a bad choice if you want a quick and free way to check the latest scores, but MLB.com At Bat Lite is better. It's less glitchy and has a more comprehensive news section. Overall rating: 2.5 stars out of 5.
What You’ll Need
The Pro Baseball Live! iPhone app is compatible with the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.
