Great for Youth/Leagues, Not for MLB

Am frustrated by iScore but that has to do with the way I use it - to score MLB games. Thats not its strong point. Its wonderful at compiling stats - which makes it perfect for youth and/or league baseball or softball. But it falls short at displaying the results of a single game after the fact - which is why baseball fans keep score at MLB and MiLB games.

The scorecard is very attractive. But try to find out who the opposing pitcher was in a particular inning or at-bat. Not easy - the scorecard is team-specific, so you have to close out of it and toggle over to the opposing teams pitching stats. Or you can go to the "play game" screen" and open the inning-by-inning pitching recap - but then you just get the pitch count, and youve had to close out of the scorecard. What pitch did a batter steal on? Was that a strike-em-out, throw-em out? Ah, for that you have to close out of everything else and open up the inning-by-inning recap, which is designed for editing and makes for a tough read. Or you could go to the notes page, which is three pages down on your scorecard. This is the frustration: iScore tends to scatter information all over the place and make you work hard to recover it. Theres a "notes" section separate from the pitch-by-pitch - but it doesnt display on the app, only in the box score you can e-mail to yourself from the website. The box score doesnt identify where players played in the field - thats only on the scorecard.

A paper scorecard is far superior - it gives you all the information you need on one page or a two-page spread. Now, iScore will probably argue that this kind of activity isnt their focus - they want to produce forms that can be submitted to the league scorer. In a recent forum discussion, a user mentioned that iScore didnt get the right order of outs on a triple play. The developers rep said that they were working on a fix but that it was a low priority, since the order of outs is "a footnote." Which, again, is true if the question is, "how did Johnny do last season," but not if the question is, "what happened on that triple play?"

It might be better to market iScore as primarily for coaches and league participants, not fans. Alternatively, an overhaul of the way iScore presents information - the logic and the graphics - could make it equally good for both youth and MLB-fan-type scorers. I dont know how interested the developer is in that kind of improvement - suggestions in their forums are usually met with "well put that on our enhancement list" (which might or might not be meaningful or "it does that already" (which is sorta kinda true, if you dont mind sifting through lots of pages, as noted). Dont get me wrong - theres a lot to like about iScore and Id love to be able to give up my paper and pencil and switch over to it. But before that happens, Ill have to ask them to sit down with Edward Tufte or some other information/graphics guru and find a better way to pull all the bits of data together into something coherent and clear and attractive. Im sure it can be done. I hope theyll want to do it.

Alan_A51 about iScore Baseball and Softball, v4.53