[dustym]

I've worked with STATS, Inc and XML Team. I've also implemented features against the Yahoo! Fantasy API and it was very nice to work with.

First off, you are going to have to deal with a rep.

STATS is the big name in the business and they feed, at least partially, many stat resellers from who you might be able to get cheaper rates. From there I'd say you should find a cheap service or a mechanism (scraping, etc) that gives you just enough data to work with and start building against it. Look at XML team for competitive pricing. If you get to the point where your app is past prototype, you should then investigate buying into the full service.

Depending on the day and the feed, wrangling sports data is awesome or horrible or both.

On the subject of scraping, I'm not sure what the legalities are. Obviously you are probably violating the TOS of any site you are visiting if you grab the data, but at the same time, strikes, balls and fouls are facts of the game.

Images and logos are sometimes provided by sports data brokers.

Take a look at http://www.stats.com/ and http://www.xmlteam.com/