As regular visitors to my site know, I’ve run a fantasy baseball league for the last several years over at Yahoo’s baseball fantasy sports site. It was free, and for me, was a fun fantasy league (meaning it wasn’t deathly serious).
Anyway, a month or so ago, there was an announcement that MLB.com had gained the rights to MLBPA (or some such stuff, I forget the deal exactly now), but the bottom line is that it gave ’em a monopoly on fantasy baseball. They were allowed to sublicense the information back out to others so they could do their own things, though. An interesting thing is that the MLB Players website (which was http://www.bigleaguers.com will be taken over by MLB.com and will be called http://www.mlbplayers.com. Thing is, BigLeagers.com was run by Yahoo, so I’m not sure how all of this will play out.
I wrote Yahoo last week about this, and they responded back with their 2005 Fantasy offerings had not been set yet. Usually, they have the preliminaries set up so that folks can do their drafts and whatnot. I’m starting to think Yahoo might not have a league this year, which would stink, as I looked at MLB.com’s listed offerings, and none of them were like the league I used to run at Yahoo.
If I hear anything further on the matter, I’ll be sure and update.