Right after I posted the “officially baseball time” item, I skipped over to e-mail — yeah, I skip … I figure it beats prancing — and was greeted by a message announcing the fantasy partnership between MLB.com and CBS Sports.

First of all, this partnership is noteworthy because it belonged to Yahoo! in 2010. At least some further interest is added by the fact that CBS’ longtime deal to run the commissioner product for NFL.com ended before the 2010 football season.

Whether it has anything to do with NFL.com pumping up the inclusion of game highlights in its new in-house fantasy product for the season just ended, video highlights is among the selling points in the ad touting the CBS-MLB alignment.

In announcing CBS Sports’ baseball product as the “official” commissioner of MLB for 2011, the ad mentions the following new features:

“– In-game and post-game video highlights for all your players
– Free MLB.com GameDay package
– Enhanced league management tools for the Commissioner
– New look
– Simple drag & drop roster management”

MLB.com GameDay is the audio package that provides local-radio coverage to games in every MLB market, which will apparently be available to everyone in your league if you sign up with CBS.

There might not be an official turnover from fantasy football season to fantasy baseball until some brand decides to be the official soft drink of it — I’m looking at you, Royal Crown Cola — but Monday, Feb. 7, could stake a pretty strong claim this year.

The Super Bowl is now behind us, which officially ends the 2010 NFL season, means at least 14 minutes before the American sports scene jumps completely into NFL Draft hype and gives us about three days before we completely tire of Aaron Rodgers’ face. (That’s meant as a knock on the media blitz, not the player himself.)

On top of that, Baseball Prospectus rolled out early this morning its first batch of PECOTA player projections for the 2011 season.

Although we all wish the system were an annual homage to former Royals infielder Bill Pecota, the acronym stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm and is BP’s “proprietary system that projects player performance based on comparison with thousands of historical player-seasons,” according to the site. (Ed. note: Oops. I guess it is at least somewhat homage to The Real Pecota. I’m sure I knew that at some point and forgot.)

“Nate Silver is probably the most famous sabermetrician not named Bill James, and PECOTA is where Nate made his biggest mark in our community,” BP’s Colin Wyers said in presenting the first season of post-Silver PECOTA numbers. (Silver, of course, has moved on to the much more fantasy-laden world of politics with FiveThirtyEight.com.)

Wyers also acknowledged the strong impact of fantasy on the readership of his site in introducing an update to BP’s WARP stat: “We know that many of you are relying on these forecasts for your fantasy teams, and we thought that it was better to get the forecasts out now rather than wait for when the entire site was ready to transition to new WARP.”

In addition to BP, MLB.com has rolled out its 2011 fantasy coverage with the Player Preview package teased from its homepage.

Of course, others might argue that fantasy football season ended a while ago, and the “experts” draft at the recent Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference that was broadcast live by Sirius XM ushered in baseball time.

Then there are those who might not care about football and point back to the December release of Ron Shandler’s 2011 Baseball Forecaster, or perhaps the November arrival of the updated Bill James Handbook. Still others who might prefer to actually focus on their family for a bit no doubt await pitchers and catchers reporting before moving into baseball mode.

No matter, really. Until RC decides to throw its weight behind one of those dates, every stat geek can pick a favorite. Whether or not you’ve grabbed a guide or fired up Excel, there’s no doubt that fantasy baseball is fast approaching.

Related: PECOTA reaction on Twitter

Had I learned of Yahoo!’s new manager-rating function in its fantasy games either via the site’s “What’s New” page or sometime after my keeper league started back up, I’d have probably shrugged it off.

Hearing about it via an article titled, “The Verdict: Yahoo! is endangering fantasy sports,” however, left me reviewing the definitions for “ridiculous” and “preposterous” to see which was more appropriate. (I’ll go with the former.)

First of all, the new feature. Here’s Yahoo!’s description: “The manager rating system is a new feature that we’ve added to our fantasy games as of January 2011. It will enable you to rate other managers in your league (Positive, Neutral, or Negative) and provide a short comment about your experience playing with them.”

Here, now, is the reaction of Fantasy Judgment’s Michael A. Stein via the aforementioned article for HardballTimes.com:

“Here is an analogy: Yahoo is Skynet. Skynet is the network of computers in the “Terminator” movie series that gains control over all machines and electronics to destroy the human race. Once Skynet gained control of the government’s military and defense programs, it launched nuclear bombs at all targets, prompting retaliatory strikes and causing the deaths of billions of people. Essentially, Skynet was the puppet master as it sat back and watched humans destroy themselves.

“Here, Yahoo is pulling the strings of fantasy sports players by giving them the means of attacking each other with the ratings system. Granted, there will not be an exchange of nuclear weapons or mass genocide, but the point is that the wheels have been set in motion for people to take the competition to whole new level.”

Give me a turducken break.

Let’s start by assuming the worst case for this new feature: Yahoo! players left and right abuse it every time a leaguemate rejects their trade offer or makes a lopsided deal with someone else. Rogue public-league players spend days negatively grading opponents they’ve never met. Some team signs Gary Sheffield. (Sorry, I got carried away.)

Who would really be harmed in that scenario? Yahoo! would be either awash in customer-service complaints or suddenly lose fantasy players who would toddle over to ESPN.com or whatever other free fantasy provider they happened upon first. Or maybe such players would decide to stick with leagues populated by people they know and pay for a different commissioner service. Whatever the case, fantasy sports would probably survive.

In reality, Yahoo! itself says, “The manager ratings will be collected and tabulated internally at first. We won’t display them publicly until we have enough data to provide accurate and useful ratings.”

If anything even approximating the worst case comes to fruition, I would have to think Yahoo!’s internal reviewers will scrap the system and say, “Oh well. That didn’t work.”

I, on the other hand, think the manager-rating system could be a good tool for Yahoo!. The site has long sported the largest traffic numbers for fantasy games, but the primary concern has been the number of public leagues that get populated by managers who never manage or basically prove to be annoying. The rating system allows you to warn potential future leaguemates about such a manager while apparently not relying on each individual assessment.

At the same time, the ratings don’t look like they’ll have any real impact. If you’re running a league and someone with a negative rating overall tries to join, the current message doesn’t indicate that said player will have to pass any likability tests before being allowed in. It’ll still be up to you to judge. For the average fantasy player who competes mainly in leagues with people he knows, I doubt the rating system will even garner much use.

In his article, Stein seems to imply that this new rating system will introduce animosity into what is an otherwise peaceful pastime in which participants lob the occasional feather bomb but generally do so while smiling. The stance — for someone building a business on third-party conflict resolution for fantasy leagues — seems confusing at best.

I’ve met and talked with Stein and recently profiled his company on this very site, so I’m not suspecting nefarious motivation to his shot at Yahoo!. I do, however, believe that any fantasy league in need of outside resolution for trade disputes is in much worse shape than it would be for the presence of manager ratings.

One of the key questions coming out of last month’s Fanball news was what would happen to the NFBC and NFFC going forward. Founder Greg Ambrosius answered that earlier this week site message boards.

The National Fantasy Baseball Championship — along with its football twin — has buddied back up with STATS, which provided technology services for the events before Fanball acquired the contests for the 2010 seasons.

Here’s what Ambrosius had to say in his Monday evening announcement:

“We’re proud to announce that STATS Inc will return as the back-end provider for this contest in 2011 and beyond. STATS ran the back-end software for the NFBC and NFFC from 2004-2009 and is the perfect partner for this contest going forward. More details will come shortly, but we wanted everyone to know this as soon as possible.

“STATS created many of the features that NFBC owners enjoyed in the past, such as an easy-to-use Conditional Bid setup, Live Standings for your league and overall standings that updated your position in real-time data, and a reliable FAAB process.

“We are VERY excited to be working with STATS Inc again and we have every confidence in the world that 2011 will be a smooth ride for our customers. The back-end software is being dusted off as we speak and it’s been tried and tested before. We believe 2011 will be a great season and we have plans for technological enhancements in the near future as well.”

Further details on the events can be gleaned from the message-board threads. Ambrosius said further announcements will follow but that the new NFBC site will include its own draft-room software that will be provided by STATS.

We’ll share any further details that become available to us.