Couldn’t resist the obvious baseball cliche but MLB.com At Bat 2009 is pretty great …

You’d expect the obvious features such as live boxscores or even live pitch tracking …

And as you can see at the bottom of the screen, you can tap to access (from left to right), GAMEDAY is live pitch & play description (screen above) that was not available last year with as much detail, FIELD is defensive and current lineup, BOX SCORE is obvious and live updated as it happens … SUMMARY is a text description of the action to this point – you can tap inning by inning to catch up … VIDEO is of course, carried over from last year where you get VIDEO CLIPS highlighting the most interesting action of that game and if we stopped here, it still would still be a solid app – access to live boxscores and a text update pitch count by pitch count would be pretty good but the big kahuna feature is LIVE AUDIO of EVERY single game played in 2009!

Just tap AUDIO on the top right when the game starts (or is live being played) and you are presented with HOME & AWAY audio feeds. That’s right – Home & Away for EVERY SINGLE game being played this year. NO BLACKOUT!

Pretty freakin’ amazing and it sounds pretty great – I tested out a couple dozen feeds – it was nearly instantanteous switching from HOME & AWAY feeds.

And it works under 3G and WIFI!

I listened longer under WIFI at home but other than one little fade out for a few seconds, it was like listening to AM radio (though slightly better sound quality).

And as you can see on the screen above, you can actually hide the AUDIO CONTROLS and still maneuver through all of MLB’s other screens so you can listen while going back a screen to see other scores or check boxscores. You obviously can’t navigate away from MLB’s app to do other things so it’s not like AM radio but if your team is not your hometown team … hard to beat this deal for $9.99 a year for EVERY SINGLE game being played this year!

The only reason this is not a Walk Off Grand Slam is that you only get live audio when the game is being played, you can’t decide to stream listen a game after it’s over or start from the 1st inning if you’re just joining the game … and sure, more video would be nice but that’s next year?

As for battery life, my partial test is that you can probably get in a full game when it’s fully charged but you probably will need to be by a power source at the end of the game.

Otherwise, for baseball fans, it’s a great and amazing app and $9.99 is an amazing deal.

And of course, another great showoff app for the iPhone and a major crimp for satellite radio …

MLB.com At Bat 2009

(clicking on the links above will launch iTunes).