According to Eric Fisher of Sports Business Journal, he just tweeted that “Stats LLC signs deal with MLB Advanced Media to become baseball’s official real-time data licensor. Story coming today in SBD.” Uh-oh.

Two years ago, MLB Advanced Media lost a court case against CDM Sports (Fanball), which essentially stated that statistics are public domain, and that a license from MLB was not required to host fantasy sports games.

Unfortunately, this new arrangement might be a great work-around for MLB, since Stats is able to choose to whom it sells its statistical data. By creating this exclusive relationship for data, MLB has gotten what it always wanted–only one source of data.

Note, the wording of Fisher’s tweet implies this relationship applies only to real-time data, which means that full post-game data may still be available from other sources.

I will update this story as the details of the relationship become clearer.

This much is clear though, having only one source of statistical data is not good for the fantasy sports industry. It limits innovation and small business development, and makes statistics something that only a few select companies can afford.