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.

– Users are no doubt already aware that Yahoo! has launched its 2010 baseball commissioner product. This year, the system has added support for auction-style drafting.

– It’s not easy to find on KentuckyDerby.com unless you already know the name of the game, but the “official” Derby site presents a fantasy game called “Road to the Roses” to accompany the Triple Crown events.

– The Fantasy Football Librarian just got back from a busy trip to Miami for Super Bowl XLIV — thanks to her win in the Buffalo Wild Wings bloggers league — and has some photos and details.

– You already loved Motorcycle-USA.com, and it can only get better with a new section devoted to fantasy. Real fans of two-wheeled racing can also play for a trip to this year’s U.S. Grand Prix.

– It’s not related to fantasy, but the San Diego Chargers are looking for interns for the coming summer, with a focus on college students. How many of us have envisioned working for a pro sports franchise at some point? Gotta start somewhere.

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

Name: Brandon Funston
Nickname: The Gamer — the moniker used for several years at ESPN (online and magazine)
Job title(s): I manage the editorial group of Yahoo! Sports Fantasy
Full-time in fantasy? Full-time in fantasy for 13 years
Age: 39
Education: Attended Western Washington University
Family status: Married (Diana - wife) with 2 children - girl (Genesi — 6 years old) and boy (Jonas — 3 years old)
Favorite fantasy sport to play: Football
Favorite sport to watch: Football
Favorite sport to play: Basketball
Favorite team (any sport): Seattle Mariners
All-time favorite athlete: Gus Williams, Seattle Supersonics
Years playing fantasy: 26 years

I got my start in the fantasy industry when: I was 13 years old when my friend’s priest hired us to co-manage his fantasy baseball team for the sum of $100 apiece. He would come out on the balcony of his church living quarters and float dollar bills down to us so we could run off and buy research materials.

Since then, my fantasy résumé includes: I started my profession on a more permanent basis in 1996 as one of the first few hired on at ESPN Fantasy Games. I worked for ESPN for 9 years, spending several years managing the fantasy sports content group and the final two years playing a more prominent role as an on-air/online analyst. I also contributed a few years as a regular fantasy columnist for ESPN the Magazine.

I made the move to Yahoo! in 2004, again taking on the role of managing the fantasy content group. This is the (ever-expanding) role in which I reside presently.

Three questions

1. What was the demand for and treatment of fantasy content like back when you first joined ESPN? How quickly did you see things start to grow?

I think insatiable has always been the best way to describe the thirst for fantasy content, then and now. There used to be very few places you could look for an “expert” take online, but the industry has grown, as has the means by which opinion can be flaunted by anyone and everyone.

From a professional presentation point of view, I know that fantasy content, at least at places like ESPN and Yahoo!, has evolved to the point where it’s nearing the same level of internal editorial scrutiny as that of its traditional sports media components. As far as growth, it seemed steady for several years after I began in the industry, but it seems to have skyrocketed, in terms of industry breadth, in the past few years.

2. What brought you over to Yahoo! Sports, and how did your role differ from what you did at ESPN?

Frankly, I had a very good thing going at ESPN, but I spent the final couple years of my tenure there in Bristol, Conn. And the reputation of life in that Northeastern town is deserved. Admittedly, I’m a West Coast kind of guy — born and raised in the moderate, albeit rainy, northwest corner of the country. While in Connecticut, we lived in a classically beautiful New England town of West Hartford, but that didn’t overcome my desire to be back on the West Coast — closer to the family, friends and way of life I was accustomed to. It was tough to leave the ego-boost that comes from getting to rub elbows with sports celebrities on a daily basis in the halls of the Bristol campus, but after two years, my vanity had run its course. And Yahoo!, another monolith in the fantasy industry, offered me a great opportunity to get back to “my” side of the country without having to take a professional step down to get there. I made the move with no regrets, and it’s the same six years later.

3. How do you balance the various sports that you cover, and how does user feedback break down among them?

I have a love for the big three: football, baseball and basketball. But because of just the massive audience that football brings to the table, it garners the majority of my focus. So, while I have a passion for fantasy hoops, I have to slight it in terms of my personal content contributions to the site because its season comes midway through the football season, a time at which I have literally no extra time to give. Baseball gets a little more love from me because it begins as basketball ends and football is still in hibernation. But, with all things — be it managing writers, contributing my own content, or managing the relationship of our content partners — it’s just a matter of prioritizing. That said, I work from home, and the gravitational pull of an office only steps away from my bed can have me at my computer at all hours of the day.

As far as the breakdown of feedback goes, I think it’s proportionate to the audience of that sport. In any fantasy sport, I think there is a somewhat similarly sized (percentage-wise) subset of that participation group that is passionate to the point of actively engaging in message boards and other modes of feedback.

This Forbes.com article from Jan. 13 points out that the magazine was founded on providing readers with sound investment advice. Now, that apparently includes advice on your investments in fantasy baseball.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg is putting together a weekly fantasy “Investment Guide” series for the site that is scheduled to run up until the beginning of baseball season, and the seemingly unlikely host isn’t the only noteworthy aspect.

ZOG (as he labels himself) is drawing contributions from Baseball HQ’s Ron Shandler, Fantasy Sherpa Scott Swanay, Yahoo!’s Scott Pianowski and Nick Rousso of Lindy’s.

“Each week we’ll profile a different position, complete with exclusive analysis and composite rankings,” ZOG writes in the opening article on catchers.

It’s not only cool to see fantasy further penetrate an outlet such as Forbes.com — which has been giving our industry some pretty fair treatment over the past couple of years — but always fun to gather proven fantasy minds and see what the collective has to say.