As we head into the off season, we begin a phase of the baseball season that was never as fascinating to me when I was younger, but in the last decade or so, I became enthralled with all the movement of players and contracts and whatnot. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing as great as the game itself, but I’ve found my enjoyment of the process almost as great as the games themselves. But not completely. :)
I think social media has played a big part in my interest in all of this. However, with all the official sources, the beat writers, players themselves, and just regular bloggers all in the mix, it can be a bit of a cacophony to keep track of without going nuts.
Enter “MLB Trade Rumors”. This is a website that I’ve been following for years, and if you’re at all interested in baseball transactions, I can’t recommend them enough. The website is available here, for free: http://www.mlbtraderumors.com – that’s been that way for awhile, and is a valuable tool.
However, we can’t always be around our computers, and there are mobile apps available for iOS & Android. Those aren’t free, but are WELL worth the cost of the app. The app costs $2.99, which is pretty darned cheap given what you get with it. Officially the app is known as “Baseball Trade Rumors”, and not “MLB Trade Rumors” like the website is. I suspect that has something to do with the name “MLB” and licensing, but that’s a non issue. Ionly point it out in case you went searching for “MLB Trade Rumors” for the app name, you won’t find it that way.
The app is HUGE around certain times of the year (Winter meetings, Trade deadline, etc). This is a great way to keep up with “up to the second” transaction rumors and whatnot. There’s other ways to get this info for sure, but I’ve found given all the hard work it is to keep track of it all, these apps do a great job sorting it down to the individual nuggets you’d want.
Now, I have an iPhone and an iPad, so how the Android version works specifically, I can’t say. My brother has that, and from what I can gather it is mostly the same – but I can’t speak from first hand experience there. I can speak from the iOS app.
You can get notifications on your phone by team, by individual player, and by league. You can also tell it to notify you of actual transactions and not just rumours, also sort by just one team set of news, the info is quite flexible in the app.
The notification system is the strongest point of this app for me, because otherwise it’s an app version of a website, and I could just look at the website for the same info. But the notifications are the reason I bought this app. In the screenshots below you can see a few examples of the ways you can set up things to be notified about.
This is a universal app, and works on the iPad too, but is one of the rare apps that I don’t like the iPad interface, and wish I could run the iPhone interface on the iPad just double spaced. There is only one other negative thing I have to say about the app. You can’t use it to send stories to your friends (via text msg, email, or Facebook). The only thing you can do with individual entries is tweet them. Which is fine, but I don’t always want to do that. Hopefully that gets changed in a future version. But this is a minor quibble, and isn’t a dealbreaker for me.
Baseball Trade Rumors is probably my second most used iPhone baseball app (the first being the MLB At Bat app). Mostly because this keeps track of trade info all the time, and I make use of the track by player feature, so I get notified on my phone when something happens with those players. I don’t have very many apps in the Notification center on my iPhone to help conserve battery power, but this one definitely lives in the notification center!
If you’re a fan of transactions, I STRONGLY urge you to look into this. Very useful tool.
$2.99 – [ App Store Link | Google Play Store ]
