What is interesting about this is that it is a very non-traditional marketing move by a small fantasy company. Fantasy Knuckleheads realizes that getting people to read its content is its biggest struggle, so it has created a tool that will bring additional people to its site. By making inclusion within the widget available to any fantasy site, asKurt Turner of Fantasy Knuckleheads put it, “This is a win-win situation for everyone involved and will help promote each others’ content and help us all achieve our goals, more readers and page views.” Well said.

The show will be hosted by Fanball experts Kyle Elfrink, Ray Flowers, and Charlie Wiegert, but I would not be surprised if other Fanball writers and editors managed to get some air time. While the show will not limited to just fantasy baseball and fantasy football talk, expect those two to seasonally dominate.

This is a great move by Fanball as the radio show becomes a great vehicle for it to talk about the National Fantasy Football Championship and continue to position that game as the premiere high stakes fantasy football game. The World Championship of Fantasy Football (WCOFF) is generally recognized as the biggest competition, but ultimately, fantasy players will flock to the game that offers the biggest prize and the best competition. Fanball has already expanded the NFFC to eight cities, which is bound to help the size of its player pool.

What high stakes fantasy football league are you going to play in this year?

Beat the Streak is a very simple idea. All a fantasy player has to do is best Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak by assembling a 57-game hit streak of his own. if you can do this, then you will win $3,000,000. Easy enough, right? Well, now in its in tenth season and millions of attempts later, assembling a fantasy hitting streak appears to be just as difficult as doing it in real life.

I cannot talk say enough about the true beauty that this game. It is a concept that takes about two minutes to grasp and about five minutes to play. Too many fantasy games get away from this basic concept, so it is always nice to get back to basics.

Some quick back of the envelope indicate that the odds of being able to assemble a 57-game hitting streak are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 529 million. That is assuming that selected player that night is hitting in the neighborhood of 0.333 and has three at-bats that night. I left off a fourth plate appearance to account for walks, hit batters, and other reasons why the batter may only have three at-bats (if you assume the fourth at-bat, the odds drop to 1 in 269 million). In other words, your odds of hitting it big are better suited for tonight’s Mega Millions drawing which has a $266 Million jackpot and has odds of only 1 in 175 million. (Although, Beat the Streak is free, it has infinitely high expected value).

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.

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.

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 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:

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.

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.

Yahoo!’s Fantasy Baseball iPhone

If all you want the application to do for you is help you make last-second lineup adjustments, it works really, really well. Getting to your lineup and switching between different lineups is really easy. Then, all the user has to do adjust the lineup is select which player to bench, and the application instantly tells you which of your other players are eligible to go into the newly benched player’s slot. If you click on a player’s name, you will instantly see that player’s performance in his last game, for the last week, last month, and for the season. The only thing missing from that screen are player notes, but I can live without that for now.

Now, if you want an application that you can use to hunt for free agents or propose trades while you have a few minutes of downtime, this application fails miserably. Fantasy players are not even able to see the player pool or propose trades. Making those are the fun part of fantasy baseball and a must have for any fantasy baseball application.

According to Yahoo!’s Mobile Fantasy Baseball page, the ability to add and drop players will be added to the application soon. And, that is the bright side to my complaints. Once Yahoo! adds these features to the application, it becomes an incredibly awesome application. Yahoo! needs to integrate trading and free agent pick-ups into the application as the season moves along, since that component of the game becomes a much more important part of successfully managing your fantasy baseball team.

Luckily, if you need to make any of these much more sophisticated moves from your iPhone, regular Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball is easily navigable.