Swing, Batter, Swing! Baseball Apps for Windows Phone
It’s almost time for Major League Baseball’s championship World Series. Keep up on all the action with these baseball-related apps for Windows Phone.
If you’re a baseball fan like me, you love this time of year.
The World Series starts October 21, and the two teams vying for the trophy are the Kansas City Royals, who swept the Baltimore Orioles in the play-offs, and the San Francisco Giants, who beat the St. Louis Cardinals last night with a decisive 6-3 win over the St. Louis Cardinals in a five-game series.
San Francisco is my team (Go, Giants!), so you know that I’ll be keeping up on their latest news with the help of the Windows Phone apps below. If you’re also a fan of this bat-and-ball game, check them out.
This well-designed app for WP 8 and above is the official app for Major League Baseball. It’s chock full of baseball goodness, including team standings, the latest news, and video highlights from the most recent games. Now you’ll also get World Series game results as well as team match-ups and line-ups.
Choose your favorite team and you can get text notifications such as game start, score change, and lead change. You can also set At Bat as your lock-screen wallpaper to feature your favorite team’s game schedule.
If your friends don’t share your baseball enthusiasm, don’t worry — find other fans via the MLB Social Clubhouse, the portal to MLB on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other social-media platforms. At Bat also features a quick link to MLB Fan Cave: With its constantly updated stream of videos, photos and baseball-related pop culture, you can happily get your daily dose of America’s favorite pastime.
The app is free to use, but for $3.99, you can get a premium subscription for live gameday radio and television coverage for the rest of the postseason.
This free app for Windows Phone 8 and above is another great way to keep up with Major League Baseball. Like At Bat, this app gives you live scores of postseason games.
But what’s different is that Baseball Pro ‘14 pulls news from various media sources, including USA Today, the Associated Press, and Yahoo! Sports. The At Bat app, in contrast, focuses on content from MLB.com.
Of course, you can pin the app to your Start screen. What’s neat is that you can create secondary live tiles — as many as you want — so you can follow multiple teams at a glance.
Another cool feature is that you can take two players from different teams and compare their stats, such as earned run average and runs batted in.
When you open this free app for Windows Phone 8 and above, you’ll see that it mimics a Start screen, complete with live tiles for scores, standings, tweets, videos and more.
Click on the “My Fave” tile to get the latest news about your favorite team. You can also set that as a live tile for your real Start screen.
One thing that’s different is that Baseball Now gives you a variety of wallpapers to choose from — photos of some major-league ballparks, including Wrigley Field (Chicago), Fenway Park (Boston), and AT&T Park (San Francisco). You know which one I picked!
If you use these apps, let us know. And we’re curious: Who do you think will win the World Series?