Here's how to follow your favorite players in MLB app
The MLB app is making it easier and more fun to follow your favorite players -- or even rival players -- than ever.
One of the coolest new features of the refreshed MLB app this season is "My Followed Players," which lets you get news, stats and highlights for any MLB player right on the app's Home screen.
So if you're a Mets fan but you want to keep up with Shohei Ohtani, now you can. Or if you're a Yankees fan and you just want to be sure you don't miss a single Aaron Judge home run, you can have New York as your Favorite Team and Judge as a Followed Player.
Here are the most-followed players on the MLB app and MLB.com right now:
- Shohei Ohtani (Angels)
- Aaron Judge (Yankees)
- Mike Trout (Angels)
- Mookie Betts (Dodgers)
- Juan Soto (Padres)
- Julio Rodríguez (Mariners)
- Francisco Lindor (Mets)
- Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (Blue Jays)
- Anthony Rizzo (Yankees)
- Clayton Kershaw (Dodgers)
"It's pretty clear, particularly with younger fans, that personalities are really important for generating interest," MLB chief operations and strategy officer Chris Marinak said after introducing the new MLB app features at last week's MLB Innovation and Fan Engagement Showcase. "And our players have great personalities. They tell great stories."
Here's how to add Followed Players in the MLB app:
If you have an MLB account already, just log into the MLB app and tap your profile icon in the upper left corner. Go to "My Players & Teams," and you'll see the Followed Players section. Then just tap to add players. You can follow as many players as you want.
Or, you can sign up for a free MLB account if you don't already have one, and you'll be prompted to add your favorite players when you register.
Followed Players will appear in a carousel on the Home tab of the MLB app, right under your Favorite Team.
The "My Followed Players" carousel has at-a-glance information about each player -- including real-time highlights, stat lines and links to their MLB player card. And there will be even more features added as the season goes on.
You can change the order that players appear in the My Followed Players carousel from within your MLB account settings. The new order will be reflected as soon as you refresh your Home feed in the MLB app, and will also update on your MLB.com page.
The app's Home tab is personalized with each fan's favorites and preferences, with an aim toward being everything a fan wants on one screen as they scroll through their feed:
- Favorite Team Snapshot
- My Followed Players
- Headlines and Video Highlights
- MLB Stories -- both feature stories and MLB's swipeable Game Stories
- The Feed -- with articles, videos, standings and more
"If you're on the East Coast, how do you get access to some of our great stars that are on the West Coast? Personalized digital [like with the MLB app] is a great way to do that," Marinak said. "That's the capability that's been unlocked in the last couple of years."
The My Followed Players feature also lets fans move seamlessly between the MLB app and MLB.com.
If you log in with the same account, your favorite players will follow you from the app to the web. (You can also follow players only on the web, or only on the app.)
On the MLB.com website, Followed Players show up in a personalized control bar on the left side of the screen. Clicking on a player will take you to his content page, with the latest articles and videos about the player, his stats, data visualizations and links to his merchandise.
You can also pick favorite players to follow on the web, not just through the mobile app.
- If you're on a player page, or if you search for a player from the MLB.com homepage, you'll see a "Follow" button next to that player's name.
- There are clickable "Follow" tags underneath content related to a player on the MLB.com homepage.
- From the left-hand control bar on MLB.com on larger-screen devices, you can click the "Edit Teams & Players" button, where you'll see an option to "Follow More Players & Teams."
Followed Players isn't the only new way fans can personalize their MLB app or MLB.com homepage. There's also a new "Follow Teams" feature.
Fans could already set their Favorite Team, which personalizes the home screen on the app and brings your team's games to the top of the scoreboard and MLB.TV. But now you can also follow more than one team.
Additional followed teams will show up in the web control bar, where you can click to their content pages, which also have live game information.
"When you start talking about a personalized experience, where I can say, 'Hey, this is my favorite team, my favorite player, and my Home tab looks completely different from your Home tab,'" Marinak said, "that's when you can start to tell the story of the players in a much more integrated way."