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).

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.

The Fantasy Sports Writers Association has announced the finalists for its seventh annual writer awards, and, as usual, RotoWire is all over the list.

The fantasy content hub drew 19 total nominations, including one for its baseball print magazine and seven categories in which at least two staffers will be competing against each other. Among those, RotoWire placed at least two entrants into writer of the year categories for baseball, basketball, hockey, auto racing and college sports.

RotoExperts.com and Yahoo! Sports tied for second most nominations, with each garnering six. Yahoo’s list included one for its baseball magazine.

ESPN nabbed four finalist spots, Sporting News grabbed three and KFFL.com showed up twice. Football Diehards rounded out the multiple-nomination field with two entries in the category for best football magazine.

Individuals up for multiple awards include …

– Yahoo!’s Andy Behrens (best football Web article, football print article and humor article)
– RotoWire’s David Regan (baseball writer of the year, baseball series and baseball Web article)
– ESPN’s Tristan Cockcroft (baseball writer of the year and baseball Web article)
– RotoWire’s Derek VanRiper (baseball writer of the year and baseball Web article)
– RotoExperts’ Chris Ryan (baseball series and humor article)

It’s worth noting that the FSWA changed its judging procedure this time around. For the past couple of years, the board of directors was in charge of whittling the entire class of entries down to finalists in each category, passing those along to a trio of journalism professors to decide on the winners.

In 2010, however, the professors took on the whole judgment process, grading all entries on a 100-point scale. Thus, the finalists in each category represent the top three finishers in the grading.

The full rundown of finalists appears below. Winners will be announced the night of Jan. 25 as part of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association winter conference.

Football Writer of the Year
Ladd Biro, The Sporting News
Dave Richard, CBS Sports
Matt Schauf, RapidDraft.com

Best Football Series
Ryan Bonini, KFFL
Michael Fabiano, NFL.com
Mike Gilbert, RotoExperts

Best Football Article on the Web
Andy Behrens, Yahoo! Sports
Christopher Harris, ESPN
Tim McCullough, RotoExperts

Best Football Article in Print
Andy Behrens, Yahoo! Sports
Cory Bonini, KFFL
Matt Waldman, Football Guys

Best Football Print Publication
Football CheatSheets
Football Diehards
Sports Illustrated

Baseball Writer of the Year
Tristan Cockcroft, ESPN
David Regan, RotoWire
Derek VanRiper, RotoWire

Best Baseball Series
Matt Lutovsky, The Sporting News
David Regan, RotoWire
Chris Ryan, RotoExperts

Best Baseball Article on the Web
Tristan Cockcroft, ESPN
David Regan, RotoWire
Derek VanRiper, RotoWire

Best Baseball Article in Print
Brent Hershey, Baseball HQ
Chris Liss, RotoWire
Jeff Stotts, RotoWire

Best Baseball Print Publication
RotoWire
The Sporting News
Yahoo! Sports

Basketball Writer of the Year
Carson Cistulli, RotoWire
Shannon McKeown, RotoWire
Brian McKitish, ESPN

Hockey Writer of the Year
Evan Berofsky, RotoWire
Jan Levine, RotoWire
Janet Eagleson, RotoWire

Racing Writer of the Year
Adam Ansell, RotoExperts
C.J. Radune, RotoWire
Mark Taylor, RotoWire

College Sports Writer of the Year
Brad Evans, Yahoo! Sports
Chris Morgan, RotoWire
Jesse Siegel, RotoWire

Golf Writer of the Year
John McNamara, RotoWorld
Scott Pianowski, Yahoo! Sports
Greg Vara, RotoWire

Newcomer of the Year
Jake Ciely, RotoExperts
Mario Puig, RotoWire
Lane Rizzardini, Bruno Boys Fantasy Football

Best Humor Article
Andy Behrens, Yahoo! Sports
John Paulsen, Bulls-Eye
Chris Ryan, RotoExperts

In the latest sign of fantasy sports’ ability to swim in the mainstream, Compete.com released last month some stats on the Web habits of fantasy players.

Compete drew results from a panel of “more than 2 million” Internet users based in the United States for the month of September, compiling numbers on daily reach, search habits and time spent on various fantasy sites.

The fantasy sports subdomain on Yahoo! and the games subdomain ESPN.com, respectively, came out as the clear top two in unique visitors, each more than doubling the next ranked URL. Worthy of note, however, is that NFL.com’s fantasy area came in third, even if you were to combine the results for each of the three ranked CBS Sports subdomains (football, baseball and college football).

Streak.espn.go.com led the way in average stay, checking in at nearly 5 minutes more than No. 2 fantasy.nfl.com. That URL, of course, takes surfers to ESPN’s Beat the Streak game, which won a Fantasy Sports Trade Association award for 2009. FleaFlicker.com and fantasy.foxsports.com followed in that category.

RTSports.com led the way in visits per person for the month at 20.56. Only two other sites beat Compete.com’s overall tally for the category (14.71): baseball.cbssports.com and myfantasyleague.com.

Other data points drawn into focus in the Compete.com release were:

– Unique visitor numbers don’t tell the entire story. Fantasysports.yahoo.com was the top site for UVs in September (6,115,530) but “attention” increased 130 percent — still not bad, while fantasy.nfl.com attention increase by 370 percent. Perhaps the increased focus on video at fantasy.nfl.com is behind its relatively higher attention.

– For search, ESPN was the clear winner for September. It captured three of the top five search-share positions: “espn” was the number one keyword sending traffic to the fantasy category, “espn fantasy football” was the number two keyword and “espn.com” was number four.

– Fantasy players drop off as the season wanes. Baseball.cbssports.com, which reached its season high in April of 516,761 UVs, was down to 347,416 in September with attention down (44 percent) and visits per person down (25 percent) from August. It’s likely that many players lose interest as they move out of contention and content related to the next fantasy season emerges (football, hockey and basketball). Wise brands should track these trends and use the insights to drive campaign creative and media buying.

More results can be found in the table below …