Programmer/designer/baseball nut Steve Varga has put together one of the most impressive baseball apps you’ll see all year, and it’s called, appropriately enough, Pennant. The interface on this app ($5 on iTunes) is gorgeous, and it’s loaded with more information than you could swing a 34-inch Louisville Slugger at.
As we now find ourselves with access to every live game detail imaginable across a multitude of devices, we must now ask ourselves the question “Where does all of this information go?” Pennant is both an attempt to explore the vast amount of baseball data that has been collected in the last sixty years as well as a study in using interactivity as a means for investigating the extremely large data sets that are becoming increasingly available.
My only grip about this is that all of the data seems to be organized by team, not by player, which might be a dealbreaker for guys looking to get an edge in fantasy games. But the video of the demo is certainly worth your time. Eventually all of us will be watching games and checking box scores and then re-watching games on tablet computers. That’s cool. I can live with anything that doesn’t involve aluminum bats.
Pennant Preview from Steve Varga on Vimeo.
