A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– No joke: A group of Canadian fantasy football fans have banded together to fill the void for a Canadian Football League fantasy game and named their project Fantas-Eh.

– This ain’t real fantasy basketball, but LeBron James’ planned big-screen debut, Fantasy Basketball Camp, has picked up a director and looks like it’s going to happen. I think the best we can hope for is that no cartoon aliens show up and LeBron stays out of any genie lamps.

– MLB.com extols its virtues as it enters its 10th season.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

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.

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– The Sports Business Journal has planned for a March 1 release an “In Depth” report on fantasy sports. According to its announcement: “We’ll call upon our team of fantasy experts to find out which segments of the business are growing the fastest. We’ll introduce you to the key players in this space and outline some of the products that have gained the most traction with consumers.”

– European fantasy games site Sportsbox.com has added a salary-cap contest for the second half of the Champions League season. It’s interesting to note that Champions Fantasy Knock-Out is a pay-to-play game.

– We all know how important it is these days to get our marketing messages out there via social media. This week, eMarketer is running a series on how to do so properly.

– Many football fans may have forgotten about Anthony Gonzalez soon after he went down with a knee injury in Week 1, but fantasy owners who drafted the Colts wideout as a No. 2 receiver sure didn’t. CBSSports.com senior fantasy writer Jamey Eisenberg wrote a feature over the weekend on Gonzalez, who will be an interesting fantasy case heading into 2010.

– It’s just one guy’s opinion but still interesting to note that this staff writer for Connecticut’s New Britain Herald dubs MLB.com the best site on the Web. Let fantasy baseball season officially begin.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

For most of us on the outside, the central focus of Major League Baseball’s winter meetings tends to be the chatter about potential trades and free-agent signings. From a business standpoint, however, another angle only mildly related to actual players threatens to cool the hot stove.

At those meetings this week, financial software giant Bloomberg is unveiling its foray into baseball statistics, developing advanced statistical tools that it plans to market to various potential customers.

The New York Times writeup from Saturday leads off with the company’s desire to market its new baseball platform to major-league teams, and, certainly, it would be pretty big for a company to sell its software to all or even most of MLB. But …

“If they convince all 30 teams to pay $50,000 each, that’s $1.5 million,” said John Dewan, the owner of Baseball Info Solutions, which sells software that analyzes fielding to about half the major league teams, told the N.Y. Times. “Is that big enough? It’s nice for a small company. For a big company? I don’t think they’ll get the return they want.”

Although Bloomberg president Daniel Doctoroff brushes off such questions by saying that not every pursuit “has to be huge,” it’s a valid question. The answer just might lie in fantasy and the related growing thirst for advanced statistical analysis.

BizofBaseball.com’s Maury Brown reports that he has been told “the consumer version for fantasy baseball management” will be central to Bloomberg’s effort and will run for about $30. The company has also struck a deal with MLB.com, which hopes that the Bloomberg platform will lure fantasy players from the popular sites at which they currently play.

Add those components to the team-directed software, and the potential return grows quite a bit. And to read the Times story, Bloomberg doesn’t envision baseball as a boundary but a launching pad to a sports wing with potentially global aspirations.

The media is due to get a look at these new applications on Wednesday, so we’ll see what the first reviews say.