One of the go-to apps I missed when moving from an iPhone to a Windows Phone was MLB's At Bat. I probably place too much importance on the results of my local practitioners of the U.S. national pastime, but, if I can't get the latest scores, I'm not a happy camper. Being able to listen to the play-by-play radio coverage, watch highlight videos, and see current standings are big plusses, and the recently released MLB At Bat 13 app for Windows Phone lets me do all of that.
The icing on the cake? It's free. That compares well with the 10 bucks I shelled out for the iPhone version, but there's a catch: You don't get all of the iPhone version's features—sadly the case with so many popular apps making their debuts on Microsoft's new (and thriving) mobile platform.
Setup
Getting MLB At Bat 13 for your Windows Phone is a simple matter of visiting the Windows Phone Store. For this review, I installed the app on a spiffy new Nokia Lumia 928. I didn't need to sign into an MLB.com account to start using the app, though a Settings option lets you sign in. As with the Bing Sports app, At Bat lets you select your favorite teams, so they'll appear at the top of your home page.
Interface
At Bat 13 sports the characteristic (formerly known as Metro) design of a well-programmed Windows Phone app: You swipe side to side to move between functions, in this case Scoreboard, Video Clips, Teams, and More. The font isn't in the standard Segoe typeface most commonly seen on the mobile apps, but rather a more old-timey, baseball-y custom one. In all, the interface is as clear as you could want. As with the Bing app, you can pin a team's page of the app to your home screen.
Using and Features
First, let me quickly note the major missing features: You don't get the live Gameday view that you get on the iOS app and on the MLB website; and you don't get box scores, news, and stats. Those are awfully key features, but some of them—news, stats, are available on the MLB mobile website, and indeed, you get a lot of the missing stuff in the competing ESPN ScoreCenter Windows Phone app.
Now let's talk about what you do get: a full scoreboard, live game status, play-by-play audio from the team's local radio stations, highlight videos, and standings. You also get a live video under the right circumstances. In the following paragraphs I'll go deeper on each of these features.
The scoreboard does everything you'd expect it to do, showing not only the current score, but also the diamond indicating runners on base, and dots for balls, strikes, and outs. At first, I was a little disappointed in this feature, since it seemed to only show games for the current day, but I then discovered that pulling the list down loads the previous day's scores, and pulling up when you're at the end of the game list loads future matchups. If you get lost in the past or future, you can tap the Today button, or choose a date on a calendar accessible from another button.
Tapping on any game entry opens the line score, with the current pitcher-batter matchup indicated below. That's not much, compared with the Gameday view you get everywhere else; ESPN's ScoreCenter app offers a nice alternative to Gameday, if that's the most important thing to you. I also don't think it would be too much to ask to have a box score choice on this page, as is available on every other platform's At Bat app.
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