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!

I know we are in the middle of spring training right now, Joe Mauer is signing ridiculously huge contracts, and ESPN Fantasy is airing new fantasy baseball commercials, but can we just get this season started already? Fantasy football and March Madness are nice diversions, but fantasy baseball is what it is all about. It requires dedication and focus for six or seven months. Endurance like this makes running a marathon look easy. It is the Cadillac of fantasy sports. The start of the season is so close, I can almost taste.

While I impatiently wait, and you look to get your day started, here is this season’s ESPN fantasy baseball commercial to whet your appetite.

Happy Monday! Come back later for some fun content!

When ESPN purchased Matthew Berry’s The Talented Mr. Roto, one of its goals was to make Matthew Berry its Mel Kiper Jr. of fantasy sports. From appearing on its NFL pre-games shows, starring in commercials, producing podcasts, and being their go-to guy for fantasy sports, ESPN has fully come through on that promise. Now, ESPN is taking it one step further with the launch of a page for Matthew Berry.

The page becomes a resource for all things Matthew Berry. From video on Berry’s appearance on “One Life to Live” to his most recent article involving 50 facts, mostly about fantasy baseball.

Matthew Berry built his reputation in the industry as The Talented Mr. Roto where he mixed in pop culture and his life with his fantasy advice. The result was a very distinctive and enjoyable style of fantasy baseball writing that stands out in a very saturated market of fantasy advice. Whether you agree with his fantasy advice (Berry does have his fair share of haters), his articles are a very entertaining read. This new page gives him a forum to expand his options as a he further develops his identity.

Congratulations, Matthew, on your new playground.

Major League Baseball Advanced Media will be able to complete its hat-trick of online sports video offerings in a new deal with ESPN. MLB.TV and March Madness On Demand are two of the finest live video offerings on the internet and will now be joined by the 3500 live events streamed by ESPN. The new site will called ESPN3.com, which will be a rebranding of the current ESPN360.com offering. Apparently, technology was a key factor in the decision to use MLBAM, as the previous version of ESPN360 required users to download Microsoft Silverlight.

ESPN360.com became one of my favorite sites this past season as I was able to watch numerous USC Trojan football games online. Since ESPN/ABC has a contract for PAC-10 and Big Ten football games, this meant that the out of market college football games were frequently available on ESPN360.com. It is a great product and definitely will be a part of sports viewing in the future.

For MLBAM, this is a major score. MLBAM, which is separately co-owned by the 30 MLB owners and MLB, has been expanding its product offerings and customer base over the last few years. All the while, raking in cash for its stakeholders, who have already received a more than ample return on their initial investment. In 2007, an initial public offering (IPO) of MLBAM stock had the company’s rumored valued at $5B. One can barely fathom what that offering would be now that MLBAM has cemented itself as a leading digital sports company (and many would argue the best).

Also, how is this for irony? The media is going to a professional league for distribution of its offerings. This offering further blurs the line between sports and the media.

via Broadcast Engineering

Remember when someone showed up to your fantasy baseball draft using a laptop? At first, you probably wrote him off as a total dork, but when he left the draft with more talent on his bench than in your starting outfield, you might have reconsidered. At this very moment, we may be at another fantasy technology paradigm shift as it is now possible to use just an iPhone to draft and manage your fantasy baseball team.

I took the liberty of looking at the available iPhone applications that would enable this not-to-distant future:

• 2010 RotoWire Fantasy Baseball Draft Kit ($3.99) This is the mobile version of RotoWire’s fantasy baseball draft kit and is complete with rankings, historical stats, projections, and analysis on the names you will hear on draft day. RotoWire also has a free fantasy news application that you may want to look into.
• Fanball.com Fantasy News and Updates (Free) Another players news application from a completely different source than RotoWire uses. For hot news, I like to check to multiple sources for the latest information, so having two player news applications on your iPhone can be nothing but good for you.
• CBS Sports Mobile (Free) This application is a mini-version of the full-fledged CBS Sports site. In addition to easy up-to-the-minute player news, you can adjust your fantasy baseball roster on the fly.
• Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball (Free) Not officially released yet either, this application will allow fantasy players to manage their teams and get real-time scoring. Conceivable, you could go the entire season without ever having to use one of those antiquated laptops.
• MLB.com At Bat 2010 (TBD $14.99) The pricing for the 2010 edition has not been announced yet, but expect this year’s version to improve on an already stellar product. Just released, MLB.com At Bat 2010 will allow users to watch any game they want (subject to blackout restrictions). In addition, just like last year’s version, fantasy players can listen to audio from every game. We can only hope that the 2010 version will feature video from every MLB game. It has in fact, gotten even better!
• ESPN ScoreCenter (Free) Just think of this application of all of ESPN’s scoreboards tucked into a nice little application. You can check out in game boxscores and even watch the gamecast of a your game of interest. This is a great free alternative to MLB.com At Bat.

Between all of those application, you can prepare for your draft, adjust your rosters, and follow player news. The days of staring at laptop during your fantasy draft just may be over. And if you get an iPad when it is released, your laptop days are definitely over.

One of the things that disturbed me about putting this list was that the fantasy baseball applications worth mentioning were either by the major or mid-major players in the fantasy industry. There is definitely a business opportunity for a killer fantasy baseball application.

There may be additional application releases in the next month, so I plan to adjust this list accordingly.

It’s been a long while since the last edition of the Fantasy Factoids, but that does not mean I stopped loving you. Getting you some quality fantasy sports news has always been on my mind.

Just today, I was thinking, “Wow! My readers would really want to check out these articles. I should do something about it!” Here is me doing something about it. Check these out:

• Fantasy football pays off for area men (Chronicle-Telegram) – A local new article about the team that won the 2009 World Championship of Fantasy Football . Although newspapers are having financial issues, local press can have a great impact in terms of drumming up interest.
• The rise and rise of fantasy sports (CNN) This is actually written from an international perspective and discusses that the international fantasy sports market, particularly fantasy soccer, may be the biggest fantasy market of all of them.
• ESPN Mobile Thrives Despite No Ties To Ad Networks Or Android (Just Another Mobile Phone Blog) It looks like ESPN found a mobile strategy that works for it. After famously fumbling with ESPN Mobile phones, by refocusing on distributing its sports content (content is ESPN’s core competency) in the mobile arena.
• Greene still going strong in postseason (Sporting News) – Shonn Greene may have officially obtained 2010 fantasy football sleeper pick of the year that everyone knows about. Do not be surprised if someone grabs Greene in the second round of your draft next season regardless of how his training camp goes.

I hope you enjoyed these articles. Keep checking back here regularly for additional and, I dare say, awesome fantasy sports news.

I told you earlier about how CBS Sports was cancelling its fantasy NASCAR and fantasy golf games for 2010. Now, it is clear that ESPN is also on this bandwagon and is cancelling its fantasy NASCAR game for 2010 as well. One of our readers received the following message upon logging into his ESPN account:

Although it is a bit fuzzy, it says:

GAME NOTICE
The 2009 racing season will be the last season for ESPN Fantasy Stock Car. Thank you for playing and check back next February to sign up for our other great fantasy racing games on ESPN.com. If you have any questions, please call the Fantasy Help Desk at 1-888-549-ESPN.

This message seems to imply that there will be a new game come Daytona 500 time, but I am not buying it. Why would you tell your customers that the game is gone and chase them away, and then, try to get them back with a new and improved version a month later? If there was a new and improved version coming, you would tell them that right away would you not?

This announcement backs up the speculation that has been going on in ESPN Fantasy message boards for a while now (see Don’t Cancel Fantasy Stock Car and This game won’t be back next year). As in the case of most niche fantasy games, Fantasy NASCAR fans are a very rabid fan base. One reader even offered to run the game for ESPN.

Again, this is a disappointing turn of events. Fantasy NASCAR has been tauted as the next big thing in fantasy sports, but with CBSSports.com and ESPN both dropping it, it may not be as commercially viable as once thought.

ESPN’s decision to cut fantasy NASCAR is probably the same reason that CBSSports.com cut its game–money. Between statistic costs, software maintenance, marketing, and writers, running a fantasy game on a major site like ESPN.com could easily get expensive with very little direct return to date. With everyone’s budgets tight these days, it is not surprising to see a reduction in services.

If you are looking for a business opportunity in the fantasy space, creating a simple fantasy NASCAR game may be. You would not have the same cost infrastructure as ESPN and may actually be able to make money doing it. Just a thought.

Every season it happens to one of the major fantasy sites, and unfortuantely, it was ESPN’s turn this season. Shortly after kickoff yesterday, Mashable! reported that ESPN Fantasy Football is Down. According to complaints about the service on Mashable! and Twitter, fantasy players were unable to log in to make roster adjustments and last minute waiver moves on Sunday. It is unclear if this issue has been resolved for Week 5.

What is really odd about this loss of service is that it happened in the fourth week of the season. Generally, when fantasy products fail it is in the first week or two of the fantasy season, since the game engines, with all of their new features, have not been tested by the masses. But, by now, system bugs are usually worked out of the system.

This is not the first time ESPN has had an early season failure, but it the first since its fantasy baseball game fabulously crashed at the start of the 2007. Every fantasy site has its issues (fantasy software on a large scale is actually really complicated problem), so this is not shocking, but just an unfortunate turn of events and just an unfortunate consequence of doing business.

I have requested comment from ESPN’s Matthew Berry, and will update this story once I receive a comment.

Let’s see if the downtime gets brought up during Christopher Harris’ 11:00am chat or Matthew Berry’s 3:00pm chat.

While ESPN consistently promotes its free fantasy football games, it has not completely abandoned the pay model. Fanball and ESPN just unveiled their new $50,000 Fantasy Football game. It is a pay-to-play salary cap game with point-style scoring, where the winner will take home a cool $50,000. Not too shabby for a $39.95 entry fee.

More importantly, the fact that two of the major players in the fantasy industry are teaming together on a game should make you take note. ESPN has become the number two player (behind Yahoo!) by offering completely free fantasy games. Fanball is the leader in pay-to-play games under its own brand, and hosting white-label games, such as the Fantasy Football Open Championship. According to Ryan Houson, Fanball’s Vice-President of Business Development, that this game came about through, “Lots of discussions. We discussed this a lot and we are excited it finally got done.” It is a win-win deal for both sides. It allows ESPN to tap into the pay-to-play market, while giving Fanball another game to market to its existing customer base, and more importantly, the ability to market to the millions of fantasy players that play at ESPN.

Congratulations to both sides on the deal, and I look forward to see how this relationship develops. If this is successful, you better expect to see something come fantasy baseball season.

After running a successful test in Chicago, ESPN announced that it will be launching new local sports sites in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas. In just three months, ESPN Chicagohas surpassed the Chicago Tribune’s Sports section as the top sports section in Chicago. Three months, that is all it took. That has to be even faster than ESPN had anticipated.

While this may not necessary mean too much for fantasy, it is interesting to note on the ESPN Chicago landing page, fantasy is no where to be seen. I find that interesting since local sports coverage is probably one of the best sources of information about fantasy players. Not even a “Hot Local Fantasy Tip” box. Then again, the emphasis is on local news, and not fantasy.

On a mostly unrelated note, does anyone find the box to the Huffington Post‘s Chicago-related news out of place? I am just surprised it is not a link to news reports from WLS-7, ABC’s Chicago affiliate.

Additional Coverage:

• ESPN Launching More Local Sports Sites: NYC, LA, Dallas Next (DIS) – Business Insider
• Across U.S., ESPN Aims to Be the Home Team (New York Times)
• ESPN.com vs Local Newspaper Sports (DanShanoff.com)