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

– Major League Soccer has collaborated with Big Lead Sports (nee Fantasy Sports Ventures) to create its Pro Soccer Picks platform. The new game presents a fantasy component watered down significantly from a previous MLS offering that reportedly didn’t find much success. (The downfall? Our guess would be the whole soccer affiliation.)

– Supporting the recently announced FSWA voting results, Rockies outfielder Carlos Gonzalez reportedly proved the winningest player in Yahoo! fantasy baseball by appearing on 53.4 percent of Yahoo!’s top 500 public-league teams. Buster Posey (the FSWA’s fantasy rookie of the year) came in second at 34.2 percent.

– Fantasy veteran Sam Hendricks has released a new book called Fantasy Baseball for Beginners. (No word yet on what subject the book covers.)

– Fantasy Healthball has been making its Internet rounds for a couple of years now. The effort that combines fantasy football with personal fitness recently got a full treatment from the San Francisco Chronicle.

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

Yahoo! Sports has long put forth the most-trafficked fantasy sports site on the Web. This year was the first time, though, that it sought to add value to its fantasy football product by dropping fees altogether.

The majority of Yahoo! players have always gotten their fantasy fix for free, but items such as live scoring were available only by paid subscription. Why the change for 2010?

“We decided to go fully free because there was a tremendous amount of interest from advertisers,” Kyle Laughlin, head of Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Games, told Investor’s Business Daily in late October.

Yahoo! had previously dropped all fees for its fantasy games in other sports, and Laughlin conceded a drop in paid subscribers before this season. Whether a result of the change or other factors, the company expects to grow its base of fantasy football users from 4.4 million in 2009 to 5 million this season. Traffic growth, obviously, is essential to surviving and thriving within a model whose revenue relies completely on advertising.

“We had to weigh the short-term financial hit vs. the potential upside of adding more users as well as trying to fulfill the demand for advertising from our partners,” Laughlin said. “It’s worked well for us this year in the sense that we sold out of our sponsorships in fantasy football, so it’s been a fantastic kind of validation of that decision over time.”

Of course, the Yahoo! model can’t necessarily serve as a roadmap for too many other fantasy game operations. Any Yahoo! subdivision starts with the advantage of the primary site drawing more than 130 million unique visitors a month. The Investors.com report also points to big brands MillerCoors, Southwest Airlines, Toyota, Sprint Nextel and Visa as Yahoo!’s leading sponsors.

Because traffic and user numbers were already so high — even the aforementioned growth of 600,000 players would represent just a 13.6 percent increase (not shabby, of course) — it’s worth pondering what kind of revenue might be driven by diversified offerings. Fewer users might have been willing to pay for live scoring, but what about a presence in the short-window (daily/weekly) games area that has been on the rise lately?

It’ll be interesting to see over the next few seasons how high the user ceiling might go for Yahoo! fantasy football and what the company can accomplish in a climate that has proved harsh to ad-supported Web properties.

Being intimately involved with the real game (not as dirty as it sounds) apparently isn’t helping a pair of NHL players in the fantasy version so far.

Via a partnership with the NHL Players Association, Yahoo! Sports is putting on a public fantasy hockey league this season that combines six consumers, four writers and pro skaters Zach Parise of the New Jersey Devils and Eric Staal, the captain for the Carolina Hurricanes.

With the season nearing its proverbial quarter pole — as far as I can tell, since I couldn’t find any mention of the letters “N,” “H” and “L” in succession on TV — Parise and Staal rank just seventh and 14th in the 14-team outfit.

Parise — who appears fairly active with the team, having made five roster moves to date — was interviewed on camera as he drafted his team and got off to a strong start. With his first pick, at the No. 3 spot, the Devil (not that one) landed Steve Stamkos of the Tampa Bay Lightning, who sits as the NHL’s leading scorer as of this posting. His “sleeper pick” of Drew Stafford has yet to really wake up, though, with just one goal in his past five games and a mere eight points for the season.

Staal was reportedly taped at draft time as well, but “technical difficulties” kept his video from being posted. For the record, neither player drafted himself, Parise selected two teammates and Staal picked three (as well as drafting Parise).

Fortunately for Parise’s fantasy team (and unfortunately for his real team), he has a lot more time to manage things these days. He recently had knee surgery for a torn meniscus — and likely other stuff — and is expected to miss three weeks.

Overall, the integration of actual athletes into fantasy games and the use of these public leagues as a marketing tool seem to be growing, and why wouldn’t they? It’s fun for all involved. But then, you already knew that about fantasy.

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

– Yahoo! has rolled out Android apps for managing fantasy hockey and fantasy basketball teams.

– It’s from more than a month ago, but still interesting: Sports business reporter Sarah Talalay of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel tells us about a pair of fantasy players who have taken on fantasy football consulting duties for friends, as well as brothers who get personal help annually from CBS Sports’ Jamey Eisenberg.

– Thousands of fantasy fans — or just dudes who like dude humor — are into the second season of The League on FX. Here’s a look back on an interview TV.com did with four cast members and co-creator Jackie Marcus-Schaeffer.

– This columnist for The Trentonian points to fantasy football’s predominance as the reason for the ratings edge the Week 6 Titans-Jaguars NFL matchup on ESPN held over the simultaneous Yankees-Rangers ALCS game on TBS. That lopsided Titans victory, of course, ended with a fantasy-altering touchdown run for Chris Johnson that spurred the Monday Night Football crew to discuss the play’s effect on fantasy owners (led by Mike Tirico).

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