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.

Yahoo!’s Fantasy Baseball iPhone application. To preface this article, I expect a mobile fantasy baseball appliction to do two things very well: facilitate easy last second lineup changes and be useful when you have a minutes to kill somewhere. The Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball for the iPhone hits a homer on the first element and strikes out on the second, sort of like if Mark Reynolds was an iPhone app.

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.

Sometimes, there is truth to a rumor. Yahoo! announced today that it did in fact go shopping and purchased Citizen Sports to further solidify its fantasy sports empire. Citizen Sports Inc is leading developer of fantasy sports games that are built into social networks, such as Facebook. While Yahoo! is clearly the leader in fantasy sports right now, this acquisition of Citizen Sports positions itself way to dominate the emerging social network fantasy sports leagues.

Oddly enough, Citizen Sports Inc started as ProTrade featuring a stock market like fantasy sports game. However, as it saw the emerging potential for social fantasy sports games (and non-fantasy sports games), it quickly adjusted its strategy to making much more traditional fantasy games for the social networks. That shift in strategy appears to have paid off very nicely.

While the official amount of the deal has not been announced, it is rumored that Citizen Sports was purchased for somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 to $50 million. According to Crunchbase, Citizen Sports was funded with at least $10M. While the investors will get a good chunk of that money, the founders will walk away with a fair share of money themselves.

Congratulations to everyone at Citizen Sports on the acquisition and to Yahoo! for another well thought out move.

Additional Coverage:

• Yahoo! to Acquire Citizen Sports (Press Release)
• Yahoo Buys Social Sports Startup Citizen Sports (Paid Content)

Wow! I struggled with how big a move this is initially. The fact that Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ’10 Named Official Online Fantasy Game for MLB.com indicated that it is much more profitable for MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) to partner with Yahoo for its fantasy baseball game than produce it themselves.

MLBAM is easily the most technologically advanced of the professional leagues, is easily top five companies for digital sports capabilities, and has a ton of awards to provide it. Running fantasy baseball leagues is something that it can easily do (and has done in the past), yet it is choosing not to do this year.

Yahoo! is by far the most popular site for fantasy baseball, and it also makes the most money. As a partner, MLBAM could not have picked a better partner. The financial nature of the relationship is unclear, but MLBAM is either getting a share of the advertising revenue, a sponsorship fee from Yahoo!, or possibility both of these situations.

From a competition stand point, it is always disappointing to see one fewer company in the mix. While MLBAM has not been known for its leagues, the fact that it was competing in the past was always a good sign. Fewer options always mean less innovation.

The underlying question here is how exactly profitable is free fantasy baseball if Major League Baseball finds it better to outsource its game? If you are operating a free fantasy baseball game, how much scale do you really need to make it profitable, and how achievable is that scale?

What are your thoughts? Am I completely off my rocker?

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.

Trades may be the single largest cause of disputes in fantasy leagues leading to the collapse of leagues and even the demise of friendships. A cottage industry to help settling fantasy disputes has developed catering to this market with sites like SportsJudge and Fantasy Dispute. A reader sent me this screen grab from his Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball sign-up, and the lower right corner, you see a new offering:

In the lower right corner it says:

Yahoo! Sports Trade Review: Yahoo! Sports staff members will review all trade protests and veto trades deemed to be unfair to the rest of the league. Just $14.99 per league.

Yahoo! has established themselves as a third-party evaluator of trades for fantasy leagues. By making sign-up part of the sign-up process, Yahoo! has made it very tempting and very easy for fantasy commissioners to remove themselves from what can become a very controversial issue within leagues.

This is good news and bad news for fantasy dispute services like Sports Judge and Fantasy Dispute. Yahoo’s entry into this market will help educate consumers about the availability of third-party fantasy dispute resolution. The bad news is that Yahoo!’s price is much lower and integrates easily seamlessly into its fantasy commissioner product. Those are things that the dispute services will not be able to compete with very easily, if at all.

With Yahoo! charging just $15 for the whole season unlimited trade resolutions, that blows away the $15 per dispute that the other fantasy dispute services charge. There is a difference in service levels as Fantasy Dispute and SportsJudge can evaluate more than trades and provide well-thought responses as to how it reached its ruling, which is above and beyond what Yahoo! appears to be offering. The question then becomes what level of service will fantasy leagues desire?

For the longest time, Yahoo! Fantasy Sports charged for its Stat Tracker. This little feature sucked you in during Week 1 of your fantasy football season. Week 1 was free, but if you wanted that hit for the rest of the season, you would have to pay Yahoo! a measly $10. While Yahoo! Fantasy Football was “free,” I knew very few players that actually paid nothing to the site. Alternatively, leagues could sign up for a Fantasy Football Plus account for $125, which gave every team member Stat Tracker, plus a few other minor bells and whistles. But, things are different now, and as a result of its actions, it is possible that Yahoo! may have destroyed the paid fantasy commissioner market.

For the 2009 fantasy football season, Yahoo! made Stat Tracker available for free. In addition, Free Agent Acquisition Budgets became available for use on the waiver wire. Both of these features were previously premium options. The biggest change was that Fantasy Football Plus was now only $30, which mainly covered the costs of the championship trophy and the draft guides that it provided its players. For the 2010 fantasy baseball season, Yahoo! has gone one step further and got rid of the Plus package all together, made Stat Tracker free, and added auction drafts to the site. It is a much better product than the previous version.

In other words, the reasons that would often cause fantasy leagues to want to move to a “better” paid fantasy commissioner site are quickly going away. Why would you pay $75 to $175 (or more) for a commissioner service when your league can get almost all of the features you need out of Yahoo?

In the past, with its clean interfaces, Yahoo! was great for new leagues or leagues looking to keep it simple and casual. Leagues would normally graduate from Yahoo! to a much more premium service. But now, with these premium features, Yahoo! is speaking to the experienced leagues that want a little more intense fantasy experience.

ESPN Fantasy helped put fantasy down this very free path over the last few years as it made has made a big push, leading by making fantasy football and fantasy baseball free and adding premium options for free. Now, it appears Yahoo! is slowly, but surely, following suit. Yahoo! is the clear leader in the fantasy sports market, so when it shifts strategy, everyone should take note. The emphasis on a free, ad-supported revenue model by the Top two fantasy sites is not a good sign for the paid guys.

Does this mean paid commissioner products are going to completely disappear and suffer? No, I don’t believe that for a second. According to Kevin Austin of MyFantasyLeague, “We still grew at a very good clip this year over last, in spite of Yahoo and ESPN both having increasingly good, free products, and in spite of the country-wide economic situation.” Many of the leagues that the paid commissioner services cater to have special or unique rules that sites like MyFantasyLeague cater too. The ability for this to be a continuing trend is what worries me most.

What is your take? Do you think Yahoo!’s completely free move will hurt paid commissioner services?

When a company is the clear market leader, which Yahoo Fantasy Baseball is, it tends to be slow and not innovate. While I would say Yahoo! has not done anything groundbreaking with its latest edition, this season Yahoo Fantasy Baseball is substantially improved over previous editions.

The first big change is that live scoring is now free. Live scoring is the drug within fantasy baseball that makes fantasy players stare endlessly at a screen, while waiting for at bats and hits to pop onto the screen. In a related move, Yahoo Fantasy Baseball has gotten rid of its Plus option, and made its fantasy baseball game completely free for all fantasy players.

The second big change for Yahoo Fantasy Baseball is the ability to conduct online auction drafts. Previously, auction drafts either had to be held offline or through a different means online. This year, it is built seamlessly into Yahoo Fantasy Baseball. Auction drafts have been on the rise for many years, and it is about time it found its way into Yahoo!. While this feature is nothing new, its inclusion is a substantial improvement.

While I do not have an iPhone, the fact that there is an iPhone app is essential and a nice improvement. The ability to adjust your roster wherever you are is much more important in fantasy baseball where player moves are made on a daily basis. The key question here is, are fantasy baseball players more likely to carry an iPhone or a Blackberry?

My personal favorite is the inclusion of Free Agent Acquisition Budgets (FAAB) are finally available in Yahoo Fantasy Baseball. The way FAAB works is that instead of depending on the randomness of the waiver wire, each fantasy player has a budget of fictional dollars that he can use to pick up players as he chooses. Everyone has a shot at every player, as long as he is willing to pay for the player. The exclusion of FAAB has been a glaring hole for a number years, as many more sophisticated leagues prefer to use it.

There are a few other smaller improvements that you might like even more, and you can check out all of the new features at Yahoo Fantasy Baseball.

Overall, this probably the best upgrade Yahoo Fantasy Baseball has had in the last few years, and is definitely worth your consideration for your 2010 fantasy baseball league.

Currently as of 10:00am this morning, on Yahoo! Fantasy Football (and possibly other scoring systems), no one is being credited for Robert Meachem’s crazy touchdown.

In yesterday’s Saints-Redskin’s game, Drew Brees threw an interception. On the interception return, Saints wide receiver Robert Meachem stripped the ball, recovered the fumble, and took the ball 44 yards for a touchdown. In fantasy football land, who gets the touchdown?

According to the football rulebook, once an interception is thrown, the offense (the Saints in this case) is now considered the defense. When Meachem stripped the ball, the defense is then credited with a fumble and the defense is the one who scored the touchdown.

Now, from a fantasy perspective, does Meachem get credit for the touchdown? It depends. If your league credits the defense and special teams with the touchdown and not the individual player, then the New Orleans defense should get credit for the touchdown. If your league credits individual players on defense and special teams with the touchdown, then Meachem should get credit for the touchdown. Right now, no one is getting credit for it, and that is a problem.

Update: Yahoo! has updated its scoring, and the New Orleans defense is now being credited with the touchdown, since with the change in possession, Meachem was considered a defense player. This is probably the most fair scoring and is also what other fantasy sites are adopting (CBSSports.com has already done it as well). Well done by Yahoo! for getting it fixed relatively quickly. However, there will still be some upset fantasy players over this one.

According to its rules, Yahoo! can make scoring corrections through Wednesday, so do not be surprised if this matter is eventually settled out and either the Saints’ defense or Robert Meachem ends up with credit for it. In the mean time, players are wondering where their points for Robert Meachem are.

Either way, this play will impact countless fantasy leagues and playoff implications, particularly since this was the last week of the fantasy football regular season for many teams. It reminds me of the Brian Westbrook kneel down two years ago or when Donovan McNabb scored a touchdown on a Wednesday three years ago.