Major League Baseball’s 2013 season has started and the league has updated a number of its successful programs from last year as it seeks to increase its appeal to fans that use mobile connected smart devices.
The heart of the effort is its MLB.com at Bat 13, which for most mobile users has been available since Spring Training started. At Bat has a host of features that we have recounted earlier so we will just list the basics here. It gives users the ability to listen to live games on a breadth of platforms including PCs and Macs, as well as most smartphones and tablets.
The platform has a wide range of features that will appeal to both serious and casual fans including individual team pages, player statistics, video highlights of current games as well as a classic games video library.
One new feature that is just ready for the regular season is support for the BlackBerry Z10, the latest platform to be supported along with Android and Apple’s iOS. If you already subscribe to MLB.TV Premium then At Bat 13 is free, otherwise it has a $19.99 one time annual fee.
A second app is At the Ballpark, which MLB is expanding to include more parks. The app is part journal, where you can record current trips as well as past ones as far back as 2005. The journal section includes the ability to share photos from the visits. It has a tickets purchase and upgrade sections for select clubs, a range of social media hooks and even allows users to hear ballpark and player entrance music.
The final app is one that can have a great payback for fans; MLB.com Beat The Streak presented by Dunkin Donuts. It is a game where fans pick players to get a hit and if they manage to beat DiMaggio’s consecutive game hitting streak of 56 games you can win a $5.6 million grand prize. No one won last year and a new rule has been added this year that if you forget to post for a day your streak will not end.
