Baseball season is right around the corner, and with it comes several great new ways to keep up with what your favorite team is doing this year. In February, as Spring Training was getting underway, MLB announced the 2012 edition of MLB At Bat, the smartphone and tablet app that allows users to listen to or watch their team’s games (provided you’ve got the necessary MLB.TV and/or Gameday Audio subscriptions). Then, just last week, Microsoft announced that an MLB.TV app was coming to the Xbox 360 console, allowing users with Xbox LIVE Gold and MLB.TV subscriptions to watch games via their console.
Now, Yahoo has unveiled their own lineup options for keeping up with the 2012 MLB season, and they bring new meaning to the term “second screen” experience. In fact, Yahoo wants to give baseball fans second, third, and fourth screen experiences, too. The first offering in Yahoo’s lineup is Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball. A free download from the iOS App Store and Google Play, Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball allows users to keep up with their fantasy baseball scores from their mobile phones.
The second offering is Sportacular. This app, which is also available free for iOS and Android devices, provides quick and easy access to scores, news, and highlights. It also includes options for push notifications, so you can be alerted when your game starts, ends, when there’s a score, or a lead change.
The third, and arguably most remarkable entry in the lineup is not strictly a sports app at all. If you’ve never heard of IntoNow, you owe it to yourself to check it out. In brief, IntoNow is to TV and movies what Shazam and SoundHound are to music. Hold your iOS or Android device up to your TV while something is on, and IntoNow will tag it and give you a variety of information about it, as well as options for sharing what you’re watching on social networks. With IntoNow, you can also now tag baseball games as well, giving you quick access to social media discussions of the games in real time, as well as giving you the option to post what you’re watching on Twitter or Facebook. The app is free for iOS and Android.
Fourth, there’s Yahoo! Sports for Connected TV. Those with TVs that support Yahoo! Connected TV (certain Sony, VIZIO, Samsung, and Toshiba models) can get scores, news, video and more on their TVs.
Finally, there’s MLB.com Full Count on Yahoo! Full Count allows users to get a wide range of information about current games, including live look-ins, highlights, historical and statistical data related to current games, and much more. The service is a partnership between MLB and Yahoo!, and goes live on April 5 (Opening Day).
How do you watch MLB baseball? Will you use any of Yahoo’s services? Do you have any of these apps? What do you think of them? Let us know in the comments.