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

– Sirius XM has held on to hosts Ray Flowers and Kyle Elfrink of the Fanball Fantasy Drive show, which is now called Sirius XM Fantasy Drive. Flowers, the creator of BaseballGuys.com, has also joined RotoWire as a contributing writer.

– From the recent Herald-News obituary of 86-year-old Emma Bianchi of Joliet, Ill.: “When Emma died Dec. 11 at the age of 86, the family lost a diehard fantasy football player. Eleven years ago, Laureen’s then-sixth grade son started a fantasy football team and asked Emma to join it. At first, Emma didn’t quite understand the logistics and selected her players based on ‘He’s got such a nice German name,’ or ‘He works so hard for his community.’” We can only guess that she also loved David Hasselhoff.

– With the Academy Awards coming up this weekend, here’s a plug for the fantasy-style games of Picktainment, which changed its name from AwardsPicks.com with the addition of games for American Idol and Dancing with the Stars.

– Steve Gardner of USA Today passes along and builds off another blogger’s pondering of whether the rise of the machines will consume fantasy sports analysis.

– You’ve probably already seen this, since it was reported by Sports Business Journal and passed along by Pro Football Talk. It’s worth noting that EA Sports will be getting a break on its rights fees for 2011 as a result of the labor strife, in exchange for a one-year extension to their deal through 2013. One has to wonder if a similar deal is available to any of the many others who pay annual rights fees.

– SI.com’s Joe Lemire recently offered an ode to Strat-O-Matic baseball for this year’s 50th anniversary.

– This agent blogger ponders the impact that Bloomberg’s foray into baseball statistical analysis — to which 17 MLB teams now subscribe — may have on player contract negotiations.

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

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

– Apparently all caught up in the excitement of the Jordy Nelson Era dawning, FX announced the day after Super Bowl Sunday that it will be picking up The League for a third season.

– Yahoo! opened the doors on fantasy baseball Tuesday, with Andy Behrens focusing on some new features for dynasty leaguers.

– Regardless of your feeling about Strat-O-Matic’s role in the creation of fantasy baseball, there’s no denying that it helped breed many a current stathead from young-geek seedling. This year marks the 50-year anniversary of the game’s creation, kicked off by a free event in New York City on Feb. 12.

– A panel of eight folks who act as fantasy football writers for assorted local Examiner.com outlets combined to vote Arian Foster the 2010 fantasy MVP, Michael Vick the “Biggest Surprise” and Randy Moss the “Biggest Disappointment.” (Wild guess: Moss reacted with a shrug and a scowl.)

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

The whole fantasy sports industry has been reaching out to a younger audience for the past few years, but Sports Illustrated is going younger than most.

SI Digital has reached a two-year deal with old favorite gaming company Strat-O-Matic to design fantasy games for a teen and pre-teen audience under the SIKids.com umbrella. Specifically, the 12 new games will be targeting 8- to 15-year-olds.

“We’re going after something that speaks more directly to this audience,” SI Kids managing editor Bob Der told Sports Business Journal. “We look at this as the most passionate time in one’s sports fandom, and there’s a definite thirst we see for a better fantasy experience for this age group.”

The effort will start with a salary-cap baseball game that was supposed to be available by Wednesday but wasn’t as of that night. The site’s fantasy page says that football, basketball and hockey will also be available by the end of the year. In addition, SIKids.com appears ready to jump into the burgeoning areas of fantasy college football and college basketball.

The games will, of course, be free to play. According to the SBJ report, SIKids.com boasted 250,000 registered fantasy users in 2008, when STATS ran the games.