iScore Baseball and Softball

I’ve been using iScore Baseball over most of the last decade, and I’ve seen it improve over each off-season. The developer is responsive and pays attention to users. That alone is a refreshing change from the “we know better than you” coders who can’t bother fixing their apps when there are problems. Going into the 2021 off-season, iScore now does about 97 percent of what I want (scoring MLB games, and occasionally games at other levels). The player substitution system is close to perfected, though it’s still sometimes difficult to locate a roster player because of the small type in the substitution list; and, it’s an art to shift a player’s position in the field without messing up batting order. The remaining quirks: (1) when showing scorecards and rosters, iScore insists on showing the home team first. Anyone who has ever been exposed to baseball knows intuitively that this is just plain wrong. (2) there is absolutely no way to account for a fly or pop ball caught in foul territory. iScore simply refuses to acknowledge it, even though it is a distinct play that has statistical implications for, say, the catcher. (1) may involve some complicated alterations to the program. (2) is a matter of adding a “foul pop” routine and links to it. I sincerely hope that one or both of these oddities can be addressed over the off-season, and meantime I can say wholeheartedly that iScore Baseball will meet any scorekeeping needs you might have, at any level of the sport.

These folks thought of just about everything when putting together this app. It more than meets my needs and expectations, and does things that other very expensive products fail to do. I love using it. Appended review: it's been at least six years now since I began using this app to do all my scorekeeping and I can't find imagine finding a better choice on my iPad. I will admit that I've grown accustomed to its use so I find it second nature, but it was always fairly intuitive right out of the box. My thanks to the developers for NOT attempting to improve too much on a good thing and mucking it up. Edit: In the last two or three years the app allows you to type the player names in full upper and lower case, however it only displays in the lineup as upper case. This is not as convenient for me for two reasons: 1) my eyesight is failing and it is actually easier to see the name in Title Case (upper and lower), and 2) I use this app to announce games over PA and it’s much more difficult to create useful pronunciation spellings in all upper case since it’s harder to show the stressed syllable. Other than this single issue, though, I continue to enjoy using iScore.

I have scored more than 300 softball games in iScore. I have scored mostly high school varsity softball as the key stat keeper, and scored two years of NJCAA softball just so that the other team parents who couldn’t make the game in person could watch the GameCast live. The developed responds typically within hours of a request. The ability for the team to pay $20 for a team stats page for one year and all the players/parents get unlimited access to the data is priceless. And the ability to correct plays postgame (yeah, I’m not perfect when things get crazy like odd double plays) is a huge benefit. With multiple years of high school data in our database, we go into first games of doubleheader’s with spray charts of the returning players. This gives us an incredible advantage. Finally, I am able to email all the stats and game summary to the head coach and all of the local newspaper sports reporters before I leave the field, meaning our softball team players get the press clippings they need to share with college coaches. I took two years off from high school to watch my daughter play JuCo. Not only is the head coach happy to have me and my iPad with iScore back, but so are the girls! Do yourself a favor. Buy this app, but participate in the forum and watch the instructional videos. You will only get the full power of this app if you spend some time getting to know it.