FirstCuts: iPhone's 'Baseball' Makes You King of Any Drunken Statistical Argument

I thought I'd do a series of reviews here on the new sports-oriented applications for the iPhone that are available in the new iTunes App Store that is either over or underwhelming people at a hipster café near you.

The first one I've chosen is one with the heavily market-researched name, "Baseball." Like everything that is truly meaningful (or utterly useless) in this life, it's completely free. Here's a video that shows roughly how it do:
What it does is turn your iPhone into a portable Baseball Encyclopedia. And what that means is ... well, it's frightening what that means. As if the rise of the internet hadn't already done enough damage to the grand old tradition of aimlessly citing dubious baseball statistics in drunken arguments, now along comes this thing. The days of shooting your mouth off about so-and-so's batting average at the corner bar to make a point about the '82 Brewers? Those days are gone, my friend. Some tweed on the corner stool is immediately going to hit you with "Cecil Cooper? In '82? He didn't hit .332, he hit .313, you idiot." And what do you do then? Your whole flow is busted. Just cause some mamaluc took you to The Phone.

The "Baseball" app is very bare bones in functionality. The splash screen is a scrollable list of every team that has ever existed anywhere (some of my favorite names I'd never heard of – "Brooklyn Superbas," "Troy Haymakers," "Worcester Ruby Legs"). You click on a team and you get a list of years. Click on a year and you get a list of every player on the roster that year. Click on a player and get his stats for that year. In 1872, the Troy Haymakers' Phonney Martin hit .308 while going 1-2 as a pitcher with a 5.79 ERA. Took me four clicks to find that out.

You can also search by player name, but that reveals the only real flaw in the application. When you find a player, you get a list of years just as you do with a team, and not (as you might expect) the classic back-of-the-baseball card grid of statistics that we're used to seeing since time immemorial. It's not the worst thing in the world, but in certain situations it will prove annoying. Like this one, for instance, a brief debate I had while watching the All-Star Game the other night with a friend (none other than the King of Uniwatch himself, Paul Lukas - not someone to front with on your stats). For some reason the name "Denny Neagle" came up (you know how it is when you're watching the All-Star Game) and I asserted that Neagle had won 20 games once in his career and it was while he was with the Reds. Paul thought it was while he was with the Pirates. Of course, we were indoors at the time and thus could just turn to the computer (we were both wrong - Neagle won 20 with the Braves). Had we not been near a computer, however - had we been in the subway, or on a picnic together, or in a massage parlor, or at the symphony - well, then we would have been screwed, because given the way the "Baseball" app works, we would have had to click on every year of Neagle's career to work it out once and for all. With that minor caveat, however, I hereby proclaim that the iPhone "Baseball" app is re-dickalick and given the price you'd be a fool not to take the thirty seconds to download that shizgang.

(Look for my review next week of the MLB At Bat app).

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.