Major League Baseball fans quickly became smitten last year with Apple’s iPad, thanks to the $15 At Bat app and its built-in MLB.TV functionality that allowed users to watch streaming video of live games wherever they might be. Now, an impressive new app delivers instant access to 60 years of baseball box scores, all reformatted and presented in a rich, infographical interface.

The brainchild of developer Steve Varga, Pennant will cost you only $5, but for that you get a wealth of historical baseball information: 115,000 box scores, detailing every play from every game going back to 1950.

* View your any team’s complete overall history (since 1950), showing the rise and fall of each team over time.

* Compare any team’s season to the rest of the league and see how they matched up in numerous pitching and hitting categories

* View the result of every game within a season, showing the rise and fall of the team’s league and division ranking.

* Show every event within any selected game, complete with updated score and event text.

* Replay each event within a game in a timeline, allowing you to relive each play.

Indeed, the primary source for the box scores came from the incredible (and freely available) repository of info found at Retrosheet, as well as some help from the Baseball Databank.

For now, the app’s custom-built API is not publicly available, although Varga is working on it, so the potential for Pennant’s functionality is far from exhausted.

And with only six weeks left until the start of the 2011 season, Pennant looks to be a worthy challenger to MLB’s At Bat as the must-have app of the year for iPad-toting baseball nuts.

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