Sure, it’s the National Pastime, but Major League Baseball games just don’t provide the constant rush of excitement you get from the National Football League. Nor do you experience the nonstop scoring experienced during pro basketball. So if you’re a die-hard baseball fan, what to do during all that in-game downtime?

GameSlam, which just launched from Chicago developer Game Time Live, looks to give baseball fans another option during those long summer contests, whether you’re sitting in the stands or plopped on your couch at home. With a simple yet comprehensive UI, GameSlam allows fans to predict and place “bets” on a multitude of potential outcomes, like whether the next pitch will be a strike or if the defense can get out of the inning without giving up any runs.

“If you ask any fantasy sports fan what they do during the game, they’ll say they’re just refreshing their stats the whole time,” company co-founder Kenny Mazursky told Wired.com. “This fills the void of not having anything to do during the game, as well as providing that social aspect that allows you to connect with your friends.”

Once an actual MLB game has started, you sign into the system and get into that game as a potential bettor, as only 100 users are allowed in per game. Each player starts with 10,000 points, and you place specific wagers (with payouts determined by GameSlam’s odds-based system) on a slew of potential outcomes, either on a pitch-, play- or game-based result. The more you put down, the more you’ll win back if you’re right. And once you’re in, you can also invite your friends to participate in a private head-to-head side-pot, even if they’re not among the public 100 users in that game.

Indeed, the gameplay and interface does give off an air of “fantasy sports lite,” which makes sense, because the developer is setting its focus on the estimated 100 million casual gamers in the United States, in addition to hard-core fantasy baseball fans. Because GameSlam is not licensed by the MLB Players Association, there are no player likenesses depicted throughout the graphical interface. You get just players’ first initial, last name and jersey number — as well as up-to-date statistics — so some elementary knowledge of the game and today’s players is helpful.

“You can just hop in and out of games, and there’s no season-long commitment to setting your fantasy baseball lineups,” said co-founder Dave Domm, “so we think it’s more appealing to casual gamers, as well as die-hard fantasy sports players.”

GameSlam gathers real-time updates, thanks to a direct socket feed from STATS. Overall, the setup is fun to use and requires little tech savvy to fully navigate. For now, GameSlam is available on the web (PC or Mac) and through Facebook. An iOS app has been submitted to Apple and is awaiting App Store approval. and an Android version is in the works.

The biggest challenge facing GameSlam is getting enough players signed up that you don’t have to solely rely on bringing in a group of friends for a fun experience. And the odds used for betting on specific outcomes are not yet player-specific, so your payback on Phillies slugger Ryan Howard hitting a homer as opposed to, say, any National League pitcher is the same, even though Howard is way more likely to hit one deep than some light-hitting hurler.

And as of now, the system is solely limited to baseball. But now that they’ve built the custom engine that game runs on, Mazursky and Domm are looking to expand into other sports later this year.

“We specifically developed the platform to be easily portable to all sports,” Domm said, “so we don’t have to build an entirely new engine to move from baseball to football to NASCAR to golf to cricket.”

Real-time cricket gaming? Now we’re playing ball.