Review: ScoreMore Baseball App

ScoreMore Baseball’s main tagline is “Moneyball for all.” Grand words for a baseball scorekeeping app, but if you’re in the market to dominate the little league fields, this could be the app for you. It is available for Android, iOS and Blackberry systems and in addition to the standard hitting statistics such as batting average and on-base percentage, ScoreMore calculates Runs Created.

Unfortunately the app lacks any advanced pitching metrics, though given the necessary league numbers, statistics like FIP or SIERA are unattainable. As their tagline suggests, the phrase “Moneyball” is thrown around quite often within the app. There is a Moneyball Dictionary where terms ranging from slugging percentage to Runs Created are described — though no formulas are revealed, which is curious given that RC is a fairly straight forward one — and even a Moneyball Lineup.

Within the Moneyball Lineup option it describes each of the first six batting positions. Notably written under the first batter section is the sentence “Regardless of a player’s physical attributes, the primary criteria for the leadoff batter is to get on base more than anyone else on the team.” They are not “selling jeans” in the app.

The demo shows the optimized lineup — with seven out of nine starting players OPS above 1.000 I sure like the demo offense — but let’s see how it stacks up against a different lineup optimizer, one available at Baseball Musings.

For a difference of .013 runs per game, the ScoreMore Moneyball lineup (outlined in red) stacks up just fine against a different one. Curious that the Baseball Musings optimizer did find find four better lineups, but rounding to the hundredths of runs is beyond splitting hairs.

A nice feature in addition to the standard score keeping is the ability to chart balls in play, though any spray chart wouldn’t be anything more than an eye-based guess. While scoring a game, you’re given the standard option of on base or out, and within the on base options there is everything else you’d expect.

Say Andrews hit a double, of the line drive type, then you’re taken to a screen to confirm the hit location by tapping where the ball landed. Imprecision, the new Moneyball!

For a free scorekeeping app ScoreMore does the job adequately enough. The lineup optimizer, while not perfect, is a nice feature as is the ability to chart balls-in-play, but the imprecision is something to be expected. If nothing else just charting ground balls, fly balls and line drives by color makes for a fun spray chart for people to look at, however this app shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

(Header image via ScoreMore)