Just when I thought just about every possible combination of fantasy games had been invented, Roster Slots comes along and has a unique take on fantasy sports. The innovation in Roster Slots is that instead of you drafting your fantasy baseball team yourself, you spin the Roster Slot machine for your player. If you don’t like the players that come up, spin again. However, you only have a limited number of spins, so there is a little bit of strategy involved. Do you lock in a mediocre middle infield to give you more shots at an awesome outfield? The scoring system is pretty standard, although simplified.

What is interesting about Roster Slots is that while it is a new format for drafting and playing fantasy sports, slot machines are so ubiquitous that most people will understand how to play pretty quickly, and Roster Slots will not have to do as much education as most new fantasy sports games tend to have to do.

Currently, Roster Slots is a free game with daily, weekly, average-per-play, and yearly leagues fantasy players can play, so you can spend five minutes on it a day, or five minutes once a week if you so choose. Roster Slots is the kind of fantasy game you would play if you had the itch to field another fantasy team and did not want to spend too much money or go through an entire draft. It makes for a fun little diversion.

In terms of sign-up, Roster Slots has done something very simple and allow players to sign up using their Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, or OpenID account. In other words, everyone should be able to play without having to create a new account, which is often a barrier that stops many people from signing up for new products. While this is common across much of the internet, easy sign-ups like this have not really seeped into the fantasy sports market.

My one complaint about the site is the fact that I had to sign up to play around with the slot machine. I think from a marketing perspective, if I could play around with the slot machine prior to signing up, it would give players a better feel for the game.

If you check out the site, you may want to check out the expert league in which I will be competing. I rarely consider myself a fantasy expert, but I am definitely capable of pulling a lever a few times.

CBSSports.com has put out a list of the 200 most popular fantasy baseball team names for the 2010 fantasy baseball season. The winner this year is Evil Empire. Movie references always make for great names, as evidenced by the fact that Chico’s Bail Bonds and the Bad News Bears both cracked the top 15, while a number of other references were spread throughout the top 200.

Surprisingly, a current news or scandal reference really did not crack the list. How did Tiger Woods themed names not even crack the top 200? There are plenty of BALCO Bombers and HGH themed teams, but no Tiger’s Harem or Elin’s Revenge? I find this omission remarkable. Or, maybe fantasy baseball players don’t care about Tiger?

CBSSports.com compiled this list by sampling the approximate 1,000,000 teams currently hosted on its fantasy baseball commissioner.

My biggest complaint about this list is not with the list, but how unoriginal can some people be? The number six team on the list is the Yankees or New York Yankees? Really, that’s the best someone can do? Short of trying to piss of a Red Sox fan in your league, that just lacks any creativity. I would call on league members to vote these members out of their league.

If you want a chuckle, take a look at the complete list of 200 names.

Originally born as FSDashboard, Screaming Sports just recently went offline as it appears that the site is officially dead. The site was derelict for most of 2009 as the owners looked for a way to keep it alive. But it appears that Screaming Sports and FSDashboard are both completely gone now as the pages do not load, and Google’s cache copies cannot bring up any files hosted on Screaming Sports’ server. Screaming Sports burnt through $1.25M in funding that it received in July of 2007.

While it attempted to market itself as fantasy sports social network, the core problem with Screaming Sports’ business model is that it was built for the super-user. Screaming Sports was a useful tool if you managed fantasy teams on multiple fantasy sites, as it allowed you to manage them from one interface. The problem is that the amount of fantasy players that have a use or desire to use such a tool is a much smaller percentage of the fantasy market. At most, maybe 10,000 players would want to use such a tool.

Now, 10,000 users is nothing to scoff at it, and that few users could actually sustain a fantasy business. However, when you have full-time salaries to support and an investor who wants a return many times what it put in to the venture, Screaming Sports set itself up to fail. A concept like Screaming Sports could work if it was done as a side project and only funded once it already had that stable user base of 10,000 users.

The other issue with the site is that it scraped data from other fantasy sites in order to do such a thing. While most of the large fantasy sites did not seem to care, it was always a risk that could have crippled Screaming Sports at any point. Being dependent on someone else for the majority of your content is never good business in which to be.

Will you miss Screaming Sports?

I am going to go off on a personal note right now.

In 2007, my fiancée ran the New York City Marathon in support of her Uncle Rick’s recovery in his battle with cancer. Unfortunately, he lost his fight the following year. In his final month, he was supported by the Hosparus of Louisville. This weekend, she and I will be running in the Kentucky Derby Festival in a fundraising effort for the Hosparus of Louisville. I will battle 26.2 in the Derby Festival Marathon to raise as many funds as I can for these two great charities. Please help us raise money for the National Hospice Foundation and the Hosparus of Louisville.

If you would like to donate you can donate on my fundraising page.

Thank you for allowing this brief personal note.

ESPN‘s 30 for 30 series is set to premier its “Silly Little Game” feature, which is a documentary about the rise of fantasy sports and the original fantasy baseball league, The Rotisserrie League. ESPN’s summary is very fair description:

Fantasy Sports is estimated to be a $4 billion dollar industry that boasts over 30 million participants and a league for almost every sport imaginable. But for all this success, the story of the game’s inception is little known. The modern fantasy leagues can be traced back to a group of writers and academics who met at La Rotisserie Francaise in New York City to form a baseball league of their own: The Rotisserie League. The game quickly grew in popularity, and with the growing use and attractiveness of the Internet, the “founding fathers” never foresaw how their creation would take off and ultimately leave them behind. Innovative filmmakers Adam Kurland and Lucas Jansen will chronicle the early development and ultimate explosion of Rotisserie Baseball, and shine a light on its mostly unnoticed innovators.

The show debuts tonight on ESPN 2 at 8pm, with four additional airings in the next week.

Considering ESPN’s commitment to fantasy sports, I expect this to be a very well done and positive piece. Fantasy sports are supposed to be fun, and I expect Silly Little Game to reflect that. For the historical value alone, this should be required viewing for anyone in the fantasy sports industry, and anyone who considers themselves a fantasy sports fanatic.

Unfortunately, there are no video embeds available, but I did find this clip on YouTube of rocker and fantasy baseball lover Meatloaf shooting a segment for Silly Little Game.

If you watch it tonight, please let me know what you think!

Twitter originally started as a side project of podcasting company Odeo. Post-It Notes were accidently invented while the inventor was playing around with a new glue. Sometimes, businesses end up with a product that is much more interesting than what the company originally set out to create. FanDuel was created as an application of the HubDub engine, and it appears that the founders have decided that the road to the promised land is with FanDuel and not HubDub. HubDub announced that the site will cease to exist as it founders have decided to focus on FanDuel, which specializes in daily fantasy sports games.

This comes on the heals of FanDuel announcing a partnership with Philly.com to host a branded version of HubDub’s game on its site. This is a very big move for Philly.com since it provides it an opportunity to create new revenue from a market that it previously could not address. If it is popular, it wins. If it fails, it does not lose anything since FanDuel is doing all the heavy lifting and Philly.com just shares in the profit.

Something to be noted here, is that Philadelphia is a very enthuastic sports market, which makes for an ideal partner for FanDuel. It is a great market to succeed, and possibly enable FanDuel to create similar relationships with other local newspaper sites. If FanDuel had partnered with a paper in a city like Miami, Denver, or Oakland, it may take longer for the partnership to be successful, perhaps too long. If this is going to succeed, Philadelphia is a great market for it and will provide a great benchmark for other cities.

The ability to shift focus is a sign of good leadership. In the examples mentioned above, the companies involved could have plowed ahead and made the original businesses or ideas work; however, they saw opportunity to make an even better idea work. Think about the cliche, “When life give you lemons, you make lemonade.” In this case, life gave them lemonade, so they took it.

Of course, this could just be a well-played PR move, as the leading question on HubDub.com is asking, “Is the Hubdub Closing news a hoax? (to force people to spend their Hard earned Hubdub$$?).” If it is, then HubDub has succeeded in getting attention to its site, as a number of technology and sports blogs have picked up on this latest bit of news. (Just search “FanDuel” on google news if you don’t believe me).

Either way, it is hard to disagree with the move that HubDub has taken. Congratulations to the HubDub/FanDuel team on making a very hard and risky decision.

Pickemfirst is a browser plugin that allows you to instantly know if a player mentioned in an article is available in any of your fantasy leagues. A simple color-coded icon will display next to that player’s name indicating that player’s availability. Mouse over that icon and you find out which league plus player news. Currently, Pickemfirst can check on a player’s availability on Yahoo!, ESPN, CBS Sports, My Fantasy League, and a perhaps a few others. In other words, Pickemfirst is scouting out players for you even when you are not thinking about fantasy sports.

I love things that are passive and can be value-added without me having to do anything extra. Pickemfirst fits that description perfectly. Pickemfirst works as a plug-in to your browser (Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer are all supported). So once, you install it, you do not have to do anything else to use it. It becomes really hard to lose a customer.

Asking fantasy players to change their habits is nearly impossible. Asking them to do something just once is about the limit of what you can expect from fantasy players. There inlies the beauty of Pickemfirst, since other than installing the application, nothing else has to be done. In fact, it takes less effort to keep using it than to uninstall and stop using it. Pickemfirst could have created a website that culled all of this information together for fantasy players, but that would have required you to check the site on a daily basis. That would never work. This model works perfectly. Pickemfirst has hit it on the head for something that I didn’t even think needed to exist until I saw it

The downside of Pickemfirst is that you may realize that you do not want to know the status of every single player in your fantasy league, and may get tired of those little icons next to each player’s name. I suspect that most people will probably get used to just like we have gotten used to those little talk bubbles indicating a link next a site’s name.

Below is an embed of Pickemfirst’s demonstration video, which does a very good job of summarizing the product:

Sometime in the last day (or potentially longer), Fantasy Players went offline and redirected its traffic to KFFL. Fantasy Players is supposed to be the flagship site for Fantasy Sports Ventures (FSV) and its advertising network of affiliates (See disclosure below). KFFL was one of the first sites purchased by Fantasy Sports Ventures, and it appears to be the future of Fantasy Sports Ventures.

Update, 20 April 2010: It now appears that visitors to FantasyPlayers.com are now directed to Fantasy Sports Ventures homepage, which is probably more appropriate. However, the old Fantasy Players interior pages are not redirecting.

Although, the redirect of traffic does not seem to be complete. Currently, old landing pages such as Fantasy Player’s NFL page (the top story was last updated around September 3, 2009) are still fully visible on the website. In fact, that page update predates Fantasy Players’ most recent shift when it became an aggregated Twitter stream. Also, any content that appears to automatically feed into the old website is still being imported, as seen by this Bruno Boys article on the AFC West that was published just last night. Perhaps those pages are meant to be there just to garner extra search traffic.

The biggest winner of this is the fact that the Fantasy Players Network toolbar, which is littered around the web on hundreds of Fantasy Sports Ventures’ network sites, links to Fantasy Players, which means that it is now linking to KFFL. That is sure to boost KFFL’s traffic numbers.

There is the potential this change has been made because there is a new Fantasy Players site coming out soon. Or, maybe it is exactly what it looks like.

Note: I previously worked at Fantasy Sports Ventures from 2007 – 2008

Maintaining a fantasy baseball team throughout a season is a very laborious task, which is one of the reasons fantasy football has become a much more popular sport (since its so much simpler). With its new game, BlitzPick Baseball is trying to make playing fantasy baseball with your friends just a little bit easier. Each week, a new challenge is issued to league members, where they select one of five players at each position to be on their team. One more important thing, BlitzPick Baseball is played completely within Facebook.

League commissioners have the option of using BlitzPick’s recommended settings or can create their own custom challenges. The ability to create the custom leagues can lead to some hilarity–all-convict week anyone? More importantly, it gives league runners the ability to customize the league to the league participants and keep the names as familiar as possible, which helps participation!

Playing with friends is always the best way to keep a fantasy league interesting. By tapping into the built-in social network of Facebook, BlitzPick has made it easier for fantasy players to sign-up their friends (it’s just a few clicks that most Facebook users should be used to making) and get thriving fantasy league. Further, by building BlitzPick on top of Facebook, it is able to take advantage of the viral nature of Facebook, with wall postings and alerts visible to non-BlitzPickers.

There is definitely a market for much more casual fantasy games that appeal to (potential) fantasy players. The number one reason I hear from people about why they do not play fantasy baseball is that it too hard and takes too much time. Blitzpick has created a game that can be played in five minutes and leaves the fantasy player with a slate of players to root for each week. That is something just about anyone can stomach.

BlitzPick is the brainchild of Chris and Becky Carella, who have formed Super + Fun to launch their new game. Becky is an experienced social game developer, while Chris is an Emmy award-winning producer and game designer. The two of them definitely have the street credentials in order to launch a successful social media game.

The only question that remains to be answered is, “Can they successfully launch a social fantasy sports social media game?” I would like to wish the best of luck as they attempt to find out.

It seems like I have spent a good chunk of the spring reporting on yet another new feature within Yahoo!’s fantasy baseball product, but that’s for good reason–there have been a number of new improvements, including this latest one. As part of its relationship with MLB.com, Yahoo! is the official fantasy baseball game of MLB and also has access to the countless hours of video that MLB owns. For just $9.95 for the season, fantasy players can see daily video clips of their fantasy players’ key plays and at-bats throughout the season. Through April 18, these clips are free, and all you have to do to watch them is click on the little blue circle next to a player’s name.

One of the neat features of these clips is that the clips are provided pretty close to real time, as I just watched the two at-bats the Rangers’ Chris Davis has in today’s game (sidenote: if he keeps hitting like this, he may not be on my squad that much longer). With these video clips, you can really scout your players. Often, from just the numbers it is difficult to answer questions such as, “is David Wright really in a slump, or has he just been unlucky lately?” Now, you can just watch his at-bats and see how well he has hit the baseball.

I recently spoke to an industry veteran who has decided to not create a commissioner product for his company because he said that there are so many good free offerings right now, that competing in that market is just not worth it, and he is dead-on. Yahoo! has made huge leaps and bounds this year creating a much better fantasy baseball product than it has had in years, and it may just be the best one available in the market.