Behind The Box Score

When you think of going to a baseball game, people always have their own things they enjoy when they go: eating peanuts, the 7th inning stretch, eating a brat, and what I enjoy most. I enjoy using an old-fashioned scorecard to keep track of what each player does at the plate, and where they hit, to what base they got, and so on and so forth. Lately, I’ve been using this app while watching games at home, just for the fun of it. The application on the iPod Touch/iPhone called iScore (4.99) is far and away the best I’ve used. It takes a little bit of time getting used to, but once you understand the controls, it is well worth the 4.99 asking price, which adds up to less than the cost of 3 scorecards at most baseball games.

In the beginning, if you have a team you score constantly, you can just create the whole team in the team manager section, as shown above. If you do it correctly, you can keep stats for the games that you score. The stats can be emailed to yourself for easy printing. They print nicely onto a page.

Once you have your teams, you set the lineup with the 9 players on the field for both teams. Then, the controls are fairly self explanatory, until you get to switching out players, etc. The scorecard prints out as if you were at a ball game. Also, if you know the type, speed, and location of any pitch, you can flick your finger to the left, and it will pull up a screen where you can enter the data you know for the pitch. That screen will reset as soon as the next pitch comes along. It will keep a running tally of where each pitch landed in the box.

Overall: This app is a winner, it’s great for scoring games at the ballpark, on TV, or any other place. The only downside I see is that it’s kinda tough to learn how to sub players the right way so that they show up correctly when you try and print the box score. That’s the only thing preventing it from being a higher 9/perfect 10.

Score: 9.1/10