Yahoo!’s Fantasy Baseball iPhone application. To preface this article, I expect a mobile fantasy baseball appliction to do two things very well: facilitate easy last second lineup changes and be useful when you have a minutes to kill somewhere. The Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball for the iPhone hits a homer on the first element and strikes out on the second, sort of like if Mark Reynolds was an iPhone app.

If all you want the application to do for you is help you make last-second lineup adjustments, it works really, really well. Getting to your lineup and switching between different lineups is really easy. Then, all the user has to do adjust the lineup is select which player to bench, and the application instantly tells you which of your other players are eligible to go into the newly benched player’s slot. If you click on a player’s name, you will instantly see that player’s performance in his last game, for the last week, last month, and for the season. The only thing missing from that screen are player notes, but I can live without that for now.

Now, if you want an application that you can use to hunt for free agents or propose trades while you have a few minutes of downtime, this application fails miserably. Fantasy players are not even able to see the player pool or propose trades. Making those are the fun part of fantasy baseball and a must have for any fantasy baseball application.

According to Yahoo!’s Mobile Fantasy Baseball page, the ability to add and drop players will be added to the application soon. And, that is the bright side to my complaints. Once Yahoo! adds these features to the application, it becomes an incredibly awesome application. Yahoo! needs to integrate trading and free agent pick-ups into the application as the season moves along, since that component of the game becomes a much more important part of successfully managing your fantasy baseball team.

Luckily, if you need to make any of these much more sophisticated moves from your iPhone, regular Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball is easily navigable.

Remember when someone showed up to your fantasy baseball draft using a laptop? At first, you probably wrote him off as a total dork, but when he left the draft with more talent on his bench than in your starting outfield, you might have reconsidered. At this very moment, we may be at another fantasy technology paradigm shift as it is now possible to use just an iPhone to draft and manage your fantasy baseball team.

I took the liberty of looking at the available iPhone applications that would enable this not-to-distant future:

• 2010 RotoWire Fantasy Baseball Draft Kit ($3.99) This is the mobile version of RotoWire’s fantasy baseball draft kit and is complete with rankings, historical stats, projections, and analysis on the names you will hear on draft day. RotoWire also has a free fantasy news application that you may want to look into.
• Fanball.com Fantasy News and Updates (Free) Another players news application from a completely different source than RotoWire uses. For hot news, I like to check to multiple sources for the latest information, so having two player news applications on your iPhone can be nothing but good for you.
• CBS Sports Mobile (Free) This application is a mini-version of the full-fledged CBS Sports site. In addition to easy up-to-the-minute player news, you can adjust your fantasy baseball roster on the fly.
• Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball (Free) Not officially released yet either, this application will allow fantasy players to manage their teams and get real-time scoring. Conceivable, you could go the entire season without ever having to use one of those antiquated laptops.
• MLB.com At Bat 2010 (TBD $14.99) The pricing for the 2010 edition has not been announced yet, but expect this year’s version to improve on an already stellar product. Just released, MLB.com At Bat 2010 will allow users to watch any game they want (subject to blackout restrictions). In addition, just like last year’s version, fantasy players can listen to audio from every game. We can only hope that the 2010 version will feature video from every MLB game. It has in fact, gotten even better!
• ESPN ScoreCenter (Free) Just think of this application of all of ESPN’s scoreboards tucked into a nice little application. You can check out in game boxscores and even watch the gamecast of a your game of interest. This is a great free alternative to MLB.com At Bat.

Between all of those application, you can prepare for your draft, adjust your rosters, and follow player news. The days of staring at laptop during your fantasy draft just may be over. And if you get an iPad when it is released, your laptop days are definitely over.

One of the things that disturbed me about putting this list was that the fantasy baseball applications worth mentioning were either by the major or mid-major players in the fantasy industry. There is definitely a business opportunity for a killer fantasy baseball application.

There may be additional application releases in the next month, so I plan to adjust this list accordingly.

You have to hand it to Major League Baseball Advanced Media–it keeps finding more and more ways to make its core offering MLB.TV accessible. MLB.TV has become a great way for fantasy baseball players to track and watch their players, and now, there are a number of new ways that MLB.TV has made it possible for players to obsess over every last pitch.

With MLB At Bat 2009 for the iPhone, users are actually able to watch games lives on their iPhone. Last year, MLBAM scored rave reviews for its MLB At Bat iPhone application, which had live scoring, play-by-play updates, and almost-as-it-happens video highlights. However, this year’s version has put it to shame. For just $10, MLB At Bat features one or two games per day, but that is expected to grow to the full-slate of games eventually. Further, users can listen to every game through MLB Gameday Audio. In addition, there is a now a free MLB At Bat Lite, which features all of the live scoring and stats.

For the early technology adapters, MLBAM has made MLB.TV available for users of Boxee. Boxee is open source media center software that has integrated all of the web’s video into it. Boxee is the software that you would run on a computer that you have hooked up to your television. Users still have to subscribe to MLB.TV in order to access it through Boxee, but this turns MLB.TV into a poor-man’s version of MLB Extra Innings.

For those on a budget, you can now get a free month of MLB.TV through a deal with Sports Illustrated. If you sign up for a free three-month trial of Sports Illustrated, receive either a free month of MLB.TV, or free MLB Gameday Audio for the season. Not a bad way to get some free baseball coverage

Even if you have a great product, your distribution channels are almost as important as the product. The more avenues and options you have distributing your product, the more people that will touch your product.

This might be a little bit of a tangent here, but what does Apple plan to do with a patent that allows a network of sensors to report real-time data directly to an iPhone. In Apple’s patent on “Personal items network, and associated methods,” Apple says the patent is for finding a lost iPhone, but it then proceeds to give numerous sports examples in the patent.

For sports, the applications are endless. By putting tiny accelerometers inside equipment like bats, gloves, balls, race cars, padding, etc, we (the sports world) would be exposed to a whole new type of data that would also have tremendous fantasy impacts. Just think about the data that could be garnered for fantasy purposes. It would be invaluable. Which running backs run as fast in the fourth quarter as they do in the first? Which ones slow down tremendously? Which quarterback scans the field the most? Whose bat speed is slowing down? Knowing this kind of data can help you determine who might be on the decline, and who might be ready to break out. That kind of speed and location data available to fantasy players would be unparalleled.

Of course, any sort of real implementation of this patent is probably years away, and might be expensive to implement, but we can dream, can we not?

On a side note, do you think Apple just has people sitting around in a room doing nothing but thinking up ideas?

Additional Coverage:

• Apple Granted Patent for Sports Sensors