MLB.com At Bat Lite review
The official MLB.com app, MLB.com At Bat Lite brings you the latest scores, news, and videos from one of America's best-loved sport leagues and lets you track your favorite teams, proving to be a treat to baseball fans. To enjoy live audio and video content, however, you have to buy a premium subscription.
Pros
Complete news source for baseball fans: Even the lite version of MLB.com At Bat Lite brings you a wealth of news and media content, featuring a scoreboard, headlines, and standings, which update as soon as the matches are finished. As a smartphone or tablet user, it's more convenient to devour this info through this app than through the official website.
Highly customizable team notifications: You can choose to receive Game Start/End, Scoring Plays, Lead Change, and News notifications, with or without sound, on a per-team basis, so that you can enable, for example, only scoring alerts for the Boston Red Sox and only news alerts for the New York Yankees.
Featured videos: While exclusive in-game highlights are a paid feature, in the Video highlights page accessible through the left-hand side menu, you'll find entertaining short videos like the Must Cs with impressive catches, hits, singles, and runners, as well as other great moments from the latest matches.
Cons
Slightly awkward controls and navigation: While navigating your way through this app isn't that hard, the swiping left and right hand gesture, so intuitively used by other apps for tab switching, is hardly used at all by this app. All the submenus, like News, Videos, or Stats are packed in a right-hand side submenu, which means you need two taps to access any of them.
Best features require subscription: To enjoy exclusive in-game highlights, MLB.TV Game of the Day, live audio and look-ins, and gameplay pitch f/x, you have to spend $2.99 a month or $9.99 for the whole 2014 season.
Bottom Line
If you love baseball, you can't miss MLB.com At Bat Lite. While it's not necessarily the easiest app to navigate, it has such an engaging stream of content that once you pick it up it's hard to put down. You don't really need to buy the subscription to enjoy it.
