It might not look like it most of the time, but ExBurgher.com is supposed to be about being an out-of-town sports fan. Crazy, I know, considering we feature silly jokes about the PNC Park scoreboard, articles about robots and previews of NFL games using Tecmo Super Bowl. But ostensibly, this site is about the experience of following the Pirates, Steelers, Penguins, Panthers and Xplosion (kidding on that last one) from 500 miles from the Point. Which brings me to mlb.com's Gameday feature.

I mean, look at this thing. It’s a living scorecard available during every contest, updating the game with each pitch, and providing me loads of information in between. For a diehard Bucs fan far from home, it’s an absolute necessity in following the day-to-day doings of the team.

Sure, you can shell out $79 to watch the games on MLB.tv, but internet video’s still shaky at times (my video card’s shot, so it always crashes my computer). Or you can give up $15 to hear Greg Brown, Lanny Frattare, Bob Walk, Steve Blass and John Wehner each night (I do this and I love it, but it doesn’t always work). But…Gameday is FREE.

So this is my ode to Gameday, my love letter and big, squishy hug to the little window that keeps me close enough to the action to discuss the game with my Dad, and makes me feel a little less bad that the Bucs are never on TV. So…

How do I love thee, mlb.com Gameday? What, do you want a number? OK,

Let me count the ways...

1. You let me watch at work.

Even when I was still living in Pittsburgh, I didn’t love weekday afternoon games. Now, I know “that’s how the game is supposed to be played” and everything’s so pure and great and wonderful in the sunshine at Wrigley Field, but that didn’t change the fact that when I got home from school, the Bucs had already played and Tuesday night was pretty much shot. Now that I’m in the working world, afternoon games are just as disappointing: My company’s computers shut out my MLB Audio capabilities, and in the case when they’re playing here in Chicago, I miss them on television.

Fortunately, there’s Gameday, updating me pitch after pitch as I eschew my daily responsibilities and work hard mostly at being aware enough to minimize the window when my boss walks by, and calm enough not to cheer audibly when the Pirates manage to drive in a run or get out of a tough inning. For three hours, I am blissfully distracted, and I literally am paid to follow the team.

2. You give me So. Much. Information.

But it’s the program itself that I love as well. Not satisfied to just act as a live scoreboard and play-by-play machine, Gameday rewards the fan patient enough to watch a scorecard update with numbers on top of numbers.

A simple wave of the mouse over any player on the field brings up a menu displaying statistics relevant to their current activity: Pitchers display pitch counts, fielders show defensive statistics, baserunners show base stealing numbers and the batter displays his average, as well as the result of his last plate appearance. Wave over the batter’s portrait, and see what he’s done in all of his at-bats during the current game. And that’s not all.

Click on any player on the lineup card and get a mini player card displaying career stats, season stats and—for all you amateur sabermetricians—his numbers in specific situations: against lefties, with the bases empty, on Tuesdays in the rain under the sign Capricorn. And it updates after each plate appearance. I don’t know if I shouldn’t be impressed with such a thing in this information age, but dammit, I am.

3. Location, location, location.

Gameday gives each pitch’s relative location, allowing me to feel all right when Zach Duke gets taken deep on a low ball (“At least he’s keeping the ball down.”). But the program doesn’t stop there, no. Gameday’s location LOCO:

Click on one of the dots above the playing field—“Home Outs,” “Home Hits,” “Away Outs” and “Away Hits”—and Gameday displays each the location of each occurrence in the category with a series of color-coded dots. Click on one for a nice look, or click all four late in the game for a Jackson Pollock effect:

Oh, and there’s more to the dots. Roll over one with your mouse, and it’ll tell you who hit it there, when they did it, and what resulted from the play. This thing is so awesome, with so much information, that I’m not sure how they can pack it all in. Which reminds me…

4. For all this information, you’re easy on the eyes.

Even with all of this crazy information, Gameday’s still pretty easy to watch. It’s unobtrusive, not drawing TOO much attention to my computer screen, and not taking up the whole thing, either. As opposed to this:

I mean, holy crap: That is gaudy. Don’t know if you can tell, but this is the version of Gameday offered by ESPN; it usually features a big, bright red logo in the top left, so you usually can’t miss that it’s from ESPN. But the thing with ESPN’s Gamecast is that, though it’s offered by ESPN, the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” and it’s got all that pretty ESPN stuff, it doesn’t offer the type of information that MLB’s Gameday does. You can’t click on the players, don’t get the baserunning stats. To tell you the truth, I haven’t even tried the thing out for a whole game: Back when Gamecast was the only way to follow a game—but before all this new-fangled broadband stuff—the thing was always way behind, and the refresh rate often cause it to regress a couple innings. Which reminds me of another great thing about Gameday.

5. You’re so punctual!

Unlike the old troubles with ESPN’s Gamecast, Gameday has never gotten slow or gone backwards. In fact, the thing is generally SO on time that it’s routinely a pitch or two ahead of the online radio feed. While I know the radio feed’s on a delay anyway, this is pretty impressive. And besides, radio doesn’t have…

6. You’ve got purty pictures.

As the Ex-Burgher’s currently a radio-only outfit when it comes to following the Bucs, it’s only through the miracle of Gameday that I even knew what Ryan Doumit, Chris Duffy and Nate McLouth looked like last season. Following a team like the Bucs, with a constantly shifting roster, it’s a great way to put faces with the club’s revolving cast.

Of course, that’s not the only thing that’s great about the player portraits.

Meet Chad Cordero, Derrick Turnbow and Brad Wilkerson, the captains of Major League Baseball’s All-“Man, do I look stupid” team. I mean, look at these guys: Cordero’s got his hat pulled down over his eyes like he’s about to write his “e”s backwards, Turnbow stinks of inbreeding, and Wilkerson…well, Wilkerson looks pretty dumb, too. And the great thing is, EVERY team has guys worth joking about. There’s got to be at least 150 emails worth of hilarity that stems from a seasons-worth of Gameday photos, from the All-Dumb to Cristian Guzman and the Crooked Hat Club (which Paul Lukas lamely calls “Crew Askew”) to the No Neck Relievers (with captain Ray “Burger” King and new Pirate Matt Capps). Frankly, it makes baseball better. Speaking of which,

7. You can actually enhance the game.

Baseball's detractors complain in chorus each summer that there's too much time between pitches, too much time between innings, that the game's just too SLOW. But they're wrong. With men on in the ninth, the game on the line, and a team's closer staring down the opponent's most dangerous hitter, the moments between the catcher's signs and the hurler's ultimate delivery are excruciating: Your palms sweat. Your heart races. You are hushed, knowing that you're about to see two men throw absolutely everything they've got at each other. In those extra "slow" seconds, it seems like it will NEVER happen, and everything but the edge of your seat goes cold. Baseball's not slow; it's suspenseful.

Strange as it sounds, watching Gameday doesn't just capture this experience; it actually enhances it. While it will never replace the experience of a TV broadcast or box seats, the time delay while the program loads the game's next event. An important pitch seems to slow the upload especially, as if the programmers themselves are excited to see the game's next event (or they're just messing with me). It usually happens a little like this:

Oh, come ON! Oh, wait…

YESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!

Wait, "Run-scoring play"? What kind of play? How many runs? I need to know! This is killing me! Come on come on come on!

This situation happens pretty much every time either team scores. I'm sure my heart will seize up any minute now.

In conclusion:

How do I love thee, Gameday? I seven love thee. No idea what that means, either. But there it is. I love you. And on some game days, you love me back: