Gambling, fantasy sports (which is sort of gambling). Baseball specifically has a history of fascinations with statistics and analytics. As a season ticket holder I still sometimes see people with a scorebook manually managing to keep track of all these metrics (in baseball scorekeeping is fairly complicated). So it doesn’t surprise me that people “follow” baseball purely by monitoring stats and following the scorekeeping.
Because they’re following a team in a league and they’re interested in the scores of competing clubs, so they know the chances of their team a title etc. It’s not unusual during tight title competitions to be watching your team play some crucial game.. and everyone explodes in joy in the stadium, because some other team playing another game in another city lost.
* Also betting
* also oddball interesting games that you may not have the time to watch
* also once upon a time this is how you followed sports, you maybe saw 1-2 games a week and the rest was in the newspaper.
Pretty much sums up how I use the app on a daily basis. It's a baseball watching companion. App on the tablet, one game on the TV.
* favorite team on the TV, app following action around the league in real time.
* favorite team game over or off day, bounce around interesting games on the TV (I'm an MLB.tv subscriber). Braves down 1 in the 9th and Acuña coming up let me flip that game on. Cole is on the mound for the Yanks let's see how he looks. Etc.
* keep tabs on games I have bets on.
Baseball is a daily sport. If you have a favorite team that's the one game that's on the TV. But I'm still interested in what's happening around the league. So have the app on the tablet with every other game and new scoring alerts.