I was just informed by a friend that MLB in their infinite wisdom has drastically changed the MLB.com At Bat app for 2012. After doing a little digging, I found an article that pretty much says it all.

This year, we’ve just confirmed that MLB At Bat 12 will be free  with your subscription, which remains at $119.99 for existing subscribers. New subscriptions will be priced at $124.99. This enables you to receive 150 Spring Training games and all 2430 regular season games (some games are subject to blackout), with no added cost for either the iPhone or iPad apps.

Every article I found about this change made it sound wonderful! This would be true if you were writing to all the folks that paid the $125 subscription last season.

First off, you do not get 2,430 games! There is no way that anyone will be able to stream every game! There are games that start at similar times, the AppleTV and iOS devices can only play one stream at a time. Sure, your computer can do more than one, but how many people are going to sit in front of their “computer” and watch several games at a time. I guess, if that computer were hooked up to an HDTV, they might, but that’s about it.

Secondly, last season, people were able to pay $15 for the Game Day Audio streams. Being forced to pay almost 10x that for the ability to listen to Game Day Audio again is ludicrous!
I’m having a hard time understanding why all the reviews I have read so far about this news is positive! I would much rather pay $30 or even $50 for MLB.com At Bat ’12!

In this household. We paid the $15 for MLB.com At Bat ’11 and $15 for the Game Day Audio. We were fine with that. In fact, I paid $30 for the apps because I bought both the iPhone and iPad versions!

To be fair, it’s not all that clear if the Game Day Audio can be purchased separately and used with the app, or the only subscription that will work with the app is the full $125 one.

The $125 subscription really caters best to people who root for a team that doesn’t play in the city they live in. My wife who is a huge Indians fan living in St. Louis would benefit the most from a $125 subscription, but as a Cardinals fan, there is no big advantage.

Ah well, time to look for a new app to track baseball!