Yahoo! Sports announced Monday that it has partnered with MLB Advanced Media to make its commissioner product the “official fantasy baseball game of MLB.com” for 2010.

The deal includes a bit more than one that might make a brand the official underwear of the Chik-Fil-A Bowl. The co-branding agreement positions Yahoo! 2010 baseball as the primary fantasy offering on MLB.com’s fantasy homepage. MLB’s own suite of fantasy games remains, but you won’t find (at least as of Monday afternoon) offerings from past partners such as ESPN or ProTrade.

Aside from the nice-looking “official” tag, partnering with MLB.com provides attractive traffic numbers. Although FSB.com doesn’t have specifics for each company’s subdomains, this quick snapshot of the past year shows MLB.com carrying an audience of about 5 million to 7 million in the buildup to baseball season before jumping to 12 million in April. For comparison’s sake, that represented significantly more unique users per month than (multi-sport) Web heavies ESPN.com and CBSSports.com over the same span.

Beyond the positioning on MLB.com, the partnership also brings to Yahoo! customized player highlights that users can subscribe to for the season for $9.95. The package will offer in-game and post-game highlights of players on your fantasy team and will be available for free preview to Yahoo! fantasy players for the season’s first two weeks.

“We believe this product will exceed fantasy baseball players’ growing appetites for deeper engagement by delivering an immediate, high-quality experience,” MLB.com senior VP of business development Kenny Gersh said in the release.

This marks Yahoo!’s third fantasy partnership with an American professional sporting body. Previous deals made the most-trafficked fantasy outlet the “official” provider of fantasy golf for PGA.com and fantasy hockey for NHL.com.

Bloomberg has garnered plenty of interest for its venture into the baseball analytics market that includes new fantasy products. Intrigued fantasy players, however, should also take a look at a new offering from one of fantasy’s big boys.

Along with the 2010 edition of its fantasy baseball products, CBSSports.com is rolling out in-depth analytical tools — which can be accessed for free on its fantasy news site.

Like in Bloomberg’s case, CBS Sports’ analytics spawned from tools geared toward business analytics. The effort is a collaboration with software company Tableau, which has been around since 2003 and hails itself as the product of combining “an Academy-Award winning professor from the nation’s most prestigious university (Stanford), a savvy business leader with a passion for data, and a brilliant computer scientist.”

CBS and Tableau began talking about the work in mid-2009 and produced some well-received tools for the recently completed NFL season. Of course, we all know that baseball is the game where stat (over?)analysis thrives, so the roll-out for this year’s fantasy baseball campaign sits as the centerpiece.

At the center of that piece is a stat referred to as “RC/27,” which means “runs created per 27 outs.” In plain language, it’s a projection of how many runs a lineup would produce in a single game if a particular player batted in every spot. For example, the rating of National League first basemen that’s sitting on the site as I write this tells me that a lineup of Albert Pujols’ would put up four more runs per game than a whole set of Derrek Lees.

CBSSports.com has tapped “data analyst” Al Melchior to present much of this research and will post new material at least several times a week through baseball season. The data presents other new stats — as well as explanations of their meanings — and the tools within these articles can be customized for different scoring systems and views. The company will also likely look to apply the tools to other sports in the future.

In this highly competitive fantasy games market, it will be interesting to see if CBS’ effort spurs similar undertakings for the other top commissioner engines. At the least, it’s another way for fantasy players to dig deeply into the numbers.

We’re all familiar with the usual fantasy baseball setup at this point. Whether you’re playing in a draft-style or salary-cap format, you try to collect the best group of players possible and beat whoever else is playing.

RosterSlots.com still asks you to build the best team, but rather than having you draft one at a time against competitors or fill each position without exceeding a “salary” limit, the site presents a slot machine. You click on the virtual lever, and three players come up at random.

The user gets a certain number of spins to fill a lineup, forcing you to decide whether to keep each set of results or take a chance that your next spin will be better.

Peter Wikander says he came up with the idea about three years ago, bringing the concept to fruition for a closed beta test during the 2009 Arizona Fall League season and then an open beta for the recently concluded Olympics.

“RosterSlots.com combines the randomness of slot machines with the strategy of fantasy game play to provide a transaction-rich casual fantasy baseball game,” Wikander told FSB.com. “I hope to attract everyone from fantasy baseball veterans to casual baseball fans who feel that a traditional fantasy league is too much for them. RosterSlots.com is simple and quick enough that you can play on the side, without making a full-time commitment.”

Although baseball is the game Wikander started with and will fully roll out first this year, his Winter Olympics offering garnered some positive attention — including some space in Nando Di Fino’s online Wall Street Journal column. In that version, users spun to acquire a trio of countries for each medal event, with the same spin rules as baseball.

“People really seemed to like doing this with the Olympics, so I think I’ll do that again in 2012,” Wikander said. “RosterSlots is a nice fit for non-standard, special event-type sports that typically have a concentrated event schedule and a good many unknown ‘players,’ so I think there’s an ongoing opportunity for RosterSlots to provide fantasy games for casual and niche sports fans who are drawn to these types of events.”

Key to his concept is the daily schedule of games — such as in special-event setups like the Olympics and the 162-game Major League Baseball season.

Of course, in an industry constantly having to differentiate itself from gambling, the obvious initial red flag with RosterSlots.com is that it sure looks like gambling. Wikander contends that his model doesn’t fit the existing parameters of gambling and that there is plenty of strategy involved to keep the “fantasy” flag flying.

“In no way does the site operate like a traditional slot machine: There are no odds, no payout, no predetermined winning combinations,” he said. “The slot machine is just a simple, interactive and intuitive platform on which to play out the economies inherent in building a roster. How much of your ‘budget’ do you spend trying to land a superstar? Do you stick with a known entity, or push your luck and risk creating a gap in your lineup? How do you get the most value out of your current assets?”

Increasing the strategy component is the fact that users can trade spin results to others to acquire their unused spins. That’s not exactly the traditional model of fantasy trading, but you’re also not sitting there mindlessly hoping for cherries to show up.

Assuming that Wikander can avoid any gambling-perception issues, the only remaining concern would be building an audience — i.e. giving users a reason to play and keep playing.

Wikander says he doesn’t plan to ever charge for his game and that prizes aren’t currently on the horizon either. He’s hoping to leverage the fantasy player’s love of transactions and build a community that will keep users on board.

In that case, Wikander will likely have to work hard to convince users to bring their friends and family members along to compete. The game is certainly simple enough for anyone to pick up, regardless of their level of fantasy knowledge. With no money or prizes on the line, however, the only allure will lie in beating others.

For that reason, RosterSlots might be ideally suited for short-term events such as the Olympics, professional tennis and extreme sports. That audience will be easier to hold for the duration of a fantasy season. Despite the obvious draw of baseball’s everyday schedule, six months is a long time to hold a consumer’s attention.

Then again, the rise of daily and weekly fantasy games opens up a variety of possibilities for game play here. As with all new concepts in this industry, we’ll see how the audience reacts.

Pickemfirst — the Web application that allows you the check on the availability of fantasy players in the content that you read — wants to add more content to its application.

Specifically, when a user applies the tool and checks on a particular player, Pickemfirst will not only tell if that player is a free agent but will bring up the most recent blog posts mentioning that player.

As part of including as many different outlets as possible, Pickemfirst has a program that will automatically grab and share your posts — as long as you contact them to be included.

Inclusion is free, and any other questions you might have should be answered here.