With baseball season in full swing, Bloomberg on June 9 released its player analysis iPhone app to feed all the stats nerds and fantasy junkies. It has up to date stats, charts, and profiles for all major leaguers. The layout for Bloomberg Sports Front Office Baseball 2010 is a home run.
The interface is easy to use. Switching between player stats, team charts, and rankings is intuitive, and every page flows perfectly to a correlating page. The first thing I noticed was how easy it is to read the player stats pages. The app – which is free to download but requires a $4.99 in-app fee to get a real at bat – gives you every imaginable stat, and lets you organize by season, or past week or month, or even this year’s projections. It even allows you scroll through players on this page, which makes player comparisons quite simple since you can see who’s the next best or worst. The player bios do the same thing, which is great for fantasy leaguers.
Front Office Baseball also has recent player news, which may seem like a basic feature, but something that many stats-oriented apps frequently leave out. Injury news? This app is a good place to find out first. The bio page, where the news can be seen, also shows a snippet of the players’ stats, and his overall and position rankings. All of this becomes useful when looking for a replacement player for your team.
Possibly the best thing about this app is its graphical representation of statistics. You can rank players by a preset stat category, or create your own ranking system that mirrors what stats your fantasy league gives points for. Then you can switch from the player bio page over to his performance page, which shows these stats over time, to see if he’s heating up or cooling down (tilting and touching lets you see stats per day), or you can see where he compares to the rest of the league in an awesome spider-web looking circular comparison graph.
This graph lets you compare players to the rest of the league or by his position, and also lets you change what you’re comparing. You can also spin it, to give you the raw numbers of any of the stats in the ranking system you’re using, or if you tilt your iPhone sideways it gives you the raw ranking numbers along with the stat from the web you’ve spun to. For you little-leaguers who can’t handle the heat of this graph, it also lets you switch over to a basic chart as well.
This app is by far the most useful, functional, seamless, up to date, and helpful baseball stats app I have ever seen. The only downside is that it takes a few seconds to load a new page. It should be expected since the amount of data it’s generating is enormous, but given the rest of the seamlessness of the app, I just expected it to load instantly.
To close this review out, Front Office Baseball is like an Armando Galarraga perfect game, meaning just about flawless. I would definitely recommend investing $4.99 if you are at all serious about your love of baseball. This app will definitely give you edge whether you’re on the go or not, since it’s easier and more fun to use than any online version of it.
