The “World Series”, or US professional baseball championships begins tomorrow with game 1 of the best of seven series between the National League’s St Louis Cardinals and the American League’s Detroit Tigers starting at 7:30 PM Eastern Time.

There is some great coverage of the games on the mobile web. If you can’t be near a radio or TV you can still follow the games play by play and pitch by pitch with the mobile web on your phone. ESPN (mobile.espn.com) does a good job with baseball, very similar to their NFL live coverage that I raved about last year. But I think MLB.com’s live coverage (wap.mlb.com) is even better than ESPN’s. A unique feature of the MLB site is a pitch by pitch graphic. The image should give you a good idea of how it looks. The site also has game photos, box scores, a running play by play narrative and lots of statistics to settle those bar bets.

This is a very well done mobile site that’s easy to navigate with access key accelerators (press 1 to refresh, for example). Page and image sizes are reasonable so the screens load quickly.

MLB.com has really embraced mobile of late. In addition to the mobile web coverage you can sign to receive text alerts during the game. MLB’s mobile web and SMS alerts are free – other than your carrier’s normal fees for data traffic and receiving text messages. There are a couple of premium services. For $5.99 for the month, Sprint customers can get live audio reports from all the games. Verizon EVDO and Amp’d customers can watch live game coverage and video highlights of the World Series games. Amp’d which is a new MVNO using Verzion’s EVDO/1-RTT network charges customers 49 cents per game plus 30 cents per MB for data transfer or $10/mo for unlimited data. Verizon customers pay 99 cents per game and also need a $15/month V-Cast subscription which includes unlimited data. You can find details about all of MLB’s mobile offerings here.
For your convenience, I’ve added links to MLB.com and ESPN mobile to the yeswap.com portal under Sports.

MLB.com Mobile: xhtml-mp
Content: Usability: