PORTLAND, Ore. ( TheStreet) -- The 2013 Major League Baseball season has begun and fans' wallets are all the lighter for it. Fortunately, smartphones and tablets can help prevent some of the loss. While we've tried to present evidence baseball is the cheapest professional sport in the land, teams keep hiking beer prices and ticket costs seemingly just to prove us wrong. So why aren't fans running for their high-definition television shelters? Basically because baseball is one of the few sports that's figured out how to enhance the live game experience through technology instead of using that technology to make live games obsolete. Also, do you see how many games there are on the schedule? Even if games against a rival are sold out and going for exorbitant sums on the secondary market, there's always that midsummer stretch of games against cellar-dwellers or late-season games when either the playoff picture is set or all hope is lost. Baseball's free market takes, but every so often it gives as demand wanes. If you want to see just how much advances in mobile technology have developed around the game, just cruise through the dozens of baseball-related apps. Amid baseball's tech exoskeleton of stats and streaming video, we found the five most essential baseball apps of the 2013 season. These apps all come up big around game time, even if your team's fortunes are looking increasingly small:
