Roto Baseball Guru

The much anticipated Canadian debut of the iPhone occurred today, and there were people lining up overnight to be one of the firsts to pick one up.  Although I’m a big fan of cool electronic gadgets, I’m not a fan of following all of the hype, let alone wasting precious hours of my life waiting in line just to be able to be one of the “first” people to get my hands on one.  Heck, it’s not even in short supply … it’s not like you won’t be able to pick one up a few days later when all of the crowds and chaos has subsided.

Now that I’ve gotten that rant off, let’s focus on the topic at hand.  The iPhone is a very cool gadget, and at a price tag of $199 US/CAD for the cheapest model, it’s become more reasonable in terms of affordability.  So what does this have to do with baseball?  Plenty I tell you, and the key is with some of the apps that are available with the iPhone.  One of the coolest ones that I’ve seen is the one provided by Major League Baseball.  There is a video here that features the MLB At Bat application on the iPhone which is quite revolutionary.  In fact, I’ll be close to calling it the baseball fan dream device.  The highlights include:

- real time stats and inning by inning score card
- full around the league scoreboard
- mini-video highlights of the game, viewable within minutes

The coolest part is the mini-video highlights, which is happening in real-time and available to you within minutes of it happen.  When you watch the video of the MLB At Bat application, you will see how crisp and detailed these highlight videos are on the iPhone.  It would make any baseball fan drool.  This is the next best thing to having the actual game streaming into your phone, which honestly isn’t that far away if either XM Satellite Radio or SIRIUS Satellite Radio decides to go down that path. But until then, I now have a valid excuse to buy an iPhone … as if I really needed one in the first place.

Watch the MLB At Bat application video here: www.rotobaseballguru.com