New Baseball App Chronicles Every Play of Every Game Since 1951

Baseball fans now have a tool at their disposal, more so a toy, to relive every game in the last 60 years through this rectangular sequence of numbers. Pennant is the new application available for the iPad exclusively that chronicles the more than 115,000 baseball games from 1951-2010, affording the fan every box score and every statistic from every season.

For four dark and dreary months, baseball fans waited patiently as they do every winter to hear those magical words that evoke images of blue skies, green grass, warm weather, and simpler times: pitchers and catchers report. For many this may not mean much, and for some sports fans America’s pastime is not yet on their radar, with the NBA All-Star game and March Madness among others standing in between now and April. But baseball fans are a different breed.

Pitchers and catchers getting warmed up means that spring training is near, which means that spring itself is within reach. Those who love baseball love this time of year, where every team has a shot to make the World Series and unsung heroes have a chance to rise and capture the imagination of a city and a nation. The beauty of baseball lie not only in the future possibilities and optimism that comes with being a fan at the start of the season, but the opportunity to relieve suspenseful and indelible moments from the past. Moments in hockey and football arise out of spontaneity, out of nowhere and at any given time. In baseball the pivotal moment comes right after the nerve-wracking phrase, “and here’s the pitch.” The beauty of baseball also lie in the box score, different than any other game, as the neatly packed, universally understood combination of numbers that explains everything that happened that day at the ball park.

David Duchovny, actor, writer, and sports fan, explained it perfectly. “It’s like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect, rectangular sequence of numbers.”

Baseball fans now have a tool at their disposal, more so a toy, to relive every game in the last 60 years through this rectangular sequence of numbers. Pennant is the new application available exclusively for the iPad that chronicles the more than 115,000 baseball games from 1951-2010, affording the fan every box score and every statistic from every season.

Simply put, the app is a massive collection of baseball numbers, and from it the most ardent baseball fans can recreate a spring game played one sunny afternoon back when. The data is displayed in a variety of effective ways to allow people to not only search for facts, but compare and contrast. Check out the box score from the game when Bobby Thompson hit his famous home run, or check out the Florida Marlin’s yearly batting average since they entered the league. There is really an exorbitant amount of data available, and just as many different ways to play around with it.

From the tutorial video, the interface looks simple, as the program offers different way to find whatever it is you are looking for (if you are looking for anything at all). Follow your favorite team through the years, pick a game to look back on, and revisit a memorable season.

It is a seemingly perfect and almost necessary item for any baseball fan. There may be those fans that still enjoy flipping open a newspaper and reading a box score in black and white. That once timeless pastime seems long gone, with digital technology handing another blow to the print industry. Even longtime ESPN Baseball writer and analyst Tim Kurkjian ended his 20-year run of collecting daily box score clippings from the newspaper in 2010.

Hopefully baseball fans will embrace technology as something useful; just in time for spring training, Pennant offers every fan all the information from the last half century about baseball. Now someone needs to get working on the first half.