RotoExperts is looking to bring personalized content each and every fantasy football league with a new service it calls the Fantasy Grinder. The Fantasy Grinder will bring personalized game write-ups to fantasy football leagues. Designed to immerse fantasy players in a much more realistic experience, it promises to offer a personal experience unlike any other in fantasy sports.

According to Scott Engel of RotoExperts:

“The Fantasy Grinder, initially designed for football, produces newspaper-style results for every fantasy football matchup in every league, in every week. All results and reports are customized to feature unique results and writeups for every individual matchup in your league every week. Skinned in an entertaining package that includes a fantasy “reporter” who spotlights actual key results and decisions, the game recaps include pointing out good decisions by fantasy owners, and take the losing owners to task for their questionable choices.”

In other words, instead of just looking at the results of your matchup, there would be a “recap” option, much like a real-life boxscore. Fantasy Grinder will also include the option for fantasy players to add their own comments (read: trash talk) into the article, to add an extra special touch to it. Here is some sample output below:

The Fantasy Grinder is the kind of product that works really well with a fantasy commissioner product; however, RotoExperts does not have one. Which makes you wonder if a commissioner offering is in the works for RotoExperts, or if the Fantasy Grinder is something that it plans to license out to other fantasy sites. Something to watch out for there.

Automated sports content is suddenly becoming a bit of a hot new trend as StatSheet announced last month that it plans to look to automate sports reporting. From a business perspective, the ability to automate content could be a gold mine for sports sites, since there is so much going on that can be reported, but it is so time intensive to do that. Creating written content is the single most labor intensive part of sports reporting out there, and the hope there is a way of automating it might change things. If you apply a product like the Fantasy Grinder to a site like Yahoo! Fantasy Sports’ fantasy leagues, it would lead to tens of millions of extra page views every week for Yahoo!, which would lead to a nice little chunk of change every week.

Last month, I boldly wrote that Fantasy Ethos would churn put 65 posts in the month of March. Like most people’s March Madness bracket, that plan went terribly astray. But, by no means, do I consider it a failure.

Fantasy Ethos published a total of 36 articles in March, which is still nothing to laugh at, as it was 100% increase in production over the previous three months. In addition, traffic was up 90% compared to the previous month, and a 12% improvement over the previous three months. The biggest difference in terms of traffic was that regular readers came to the site more often, and that new articles were getting better placement on search engines.

Another positive side effect was that Fantasy Ethos’ Google Page Rank increased from a 3 to a 4. While this could be completely coincidentally, publishing more original content probably contributed at some level, since Google loves fresh content.

For me, the whole purpose of March Madness was to kick start some momentum for the site, and that has been achieved. Articles are published much more often, people are checking the site more often, and more new people find the site everyday. Going forward, March will be my benchmark that the next month needs to beat. I still have plenty of tricks up my sleeves for Fantasy Ethos, so who knows what you will find here next! (Well, I do, but you know what I mean!) While 65 posts in a month seems like a lofty goal right now, there will be a day when that is a bad month. Thanks for supporting me and Fantasy Ethos on this journey!

Yahoo!’s Fantasy Baseball iPhone application. To preface this article, I expect a mobile fantasy baseball appliction to do two things very well: facilitate easy last second lineup changes and be useful when you have a minutes to kill somewhere. The Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball for the iPhone hits a homer on the first element and strikes out on the second, sort of like if Mark Reynolds was an iPhone app.

If all you want the application to do for you is help you make last-second lineup adjustments, it works really, really well. Getting to your lineup and switching between different lineups is really easy. Then, all the user has to do adjust the lineup is select which player to bench, and the application instantly tells you which of your other players are eligible to go into the newly benched player’s slot. If you click on a player’s name, you will instantly see that player’s performance in his last game, for the last week, last month, and for the season. The only thing missing from that screen are player notes, but I can live without that for now.

Now, if you want an application that you can use to hunt for free agents or propose trades while you have a few minutes of downtime, this application fails miserably. Fantasy players are not even able to see the player pool or propose trades. Making those are the fun part of fantasy baseball and a must have for any fantasy baseball application.

According to Yahoo!’s Mobile Fantasy Baseball page, the ability to add and drop players will be added to the application soon. And, that is the bright side to my complaints. Once Yahoo! adds these features to the application, it becomes an incredibly awesome application. Yahoo! needs to integrate trading and free agent pick-ups into the application as the season moves along, since that component of the game becomes a much more important part of successfully managing your fantasy baseball team.

Luckily, if you need to make any of these much more sophisticated moves from your iPhone, regular Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball is easily navigable.

Tonight, the first pitch of the 2010 baseball season has been thrown and we are on our way! This is the most wonderful time of the year! Here’s a quick video clip that always gets me excited for the start of the baseball season. It’s a remake of a classic Chevrolet commercial. Enjoy!

What gets you excited for the start of the baseball season?

Fantasyland, the book, is by far one of the best books I have ever read about fantasy sports. It captures the spirit, the history, and the fun of fantasy baseball. Fantasyland the movie showcases the obsessiveness of one player that cannot help but make you cringe. The movie follows an average guy Jed Latkin as he competes in the 2008 AL Tout Wars and will stop at almost nothing to make his fantasy baseball team a better team.

Latkin has an enthuasism for fantasy baseball that may just be unmatched. While a certain amount of this movie is Latkin being over the top for the camera (at least, I hope it is), Latkin’s enthusism borders on a very truly unhealthy obsession for fantasy baseball. If he actually did drive over 7 hours to Roanoke, Virginia just to negotiate a trade with a surprised Ron Shandler, or actually nearly miss the birth of his children negotiating a trade, that’s just a bit creepy. One of the things that made Walker’s original story so captivating is that he definitely did push the limits of reason of what you could do to win a fantasy baseball league, but it never seemed that Walker had his priorities mismatched or lacked a sense of common courtesy.

The movie does have some bright spots that make it tolerable. The narrative interludes with Fantasyland author Sam Walker act as the voice of reason, bringing to life the great storytelling of Fantasyland, if only for a moment. The side interviews on anecdotes do give a little bit of character to the movie.

I really wanted this to be a good review of a movie that I was very excited to see. Unfortunately, this is not it. Although, one possible use for this version of Fantasyland is to have your significant other watch the movie just so you can say to her, “be thankful I’m not that guy.”

If you are interested in seeing what I am talking about, you can watch Fantasyland the movie online.