Apparently, Keith Olbermann plays Fantasy Baseball at ESPN.com and isn’t too happy with the problems we’ve had this year. While I don’t want to speak out of turn, it’s been a pretty horrible fantasy baseball season so far with ESPN’s new Fantasy Baseball game. The short version, for those of you who aren’t using ESPN.com this year, is that a critical software bug made it past testing. You can read more here if you want the details.

Anyway, Olbermann laid into the fantasy team on the Dan Patrick Show (mp3 here) because he felt his team wasn’t that broken, so he’d rather we left it alone. Unfortunately, the bug wasn’t quite that simple, and we had to reset everything.

Anyway, so if Olbermann wasn’t harsh enough on the radio, on Wednesday night he took the next step of naming John Kosner, who is the SVP that runs ESPN New Media, the third Worst Person in the World. A bit harsh, there, don’t you think, Olbermann?

In defense of John, he’s a good guy and while he puts his name out there to take the blame, he really isn’t at fault here for the problems with Fantasy Baseball. Ultimately, he (and the rest of the Fantasy Team and even the company) takes issues like this seriously. While many companies just hide behind some relatively anonymous name (”Customer Service”), he’s chosen to give a name and, now on Olbermann, a face to show folks we care. So, go easy on Kosner there, Keith.

As for the Fantasy team, they’ve been working literally day-and-night to solve the issues with transactions and are finally getting some sleep tonight. I was there for one of the early all-nighters and they really haven’t gone home to sleep most nights. These are folks that care about the games they build. They wouldn’t have taken the step of reseting the rosters if they thought there was another way around it all.

Anyway, for the folks at ESPN.com, here’s a screen shot of an unfairly maligned Kosner joining two truly deserving World’s Worsts, Bill O’Reilly and Dick Morris:

You can watch the video clip here on Olbermann’s site (click on the Bill O’Reilly World’s Worst Immigration video). I also have the video here on FM, which you can watch by clicking here. The video is a PSP formatted MP4 vid, so it might be a little stretched out on a normal monitor.

(While I do work for ESPN.com, and have worked on fantasy games in the past, I’m speaking here as a private individual.)

We just tried to hold a fantasy baseball auction draft online at FantasyAuctioneer.com with terrible results. Our 8 team, NL-only league had trouble with 2 people joining (25%) and had the site go down twice during the first 30 minutes. While the draft was happening, it was fun, but the whole thing was disappointing because we kept having to pause it to let people get back on or because when the site crashed, not everyone knew it was back up at the same time.

This is definitely a hard problem to solve technically, which is why there are so few auction sites, but it’s amazing to me that none of the majors (ESPN, Yahoo, Sportsline) have rolled out auction draft software yet. I’ve heard rumors at work that our advanced dev. team has an auction draft in the works for next football season, but that would be the first one I know of from the majors.

We’re going to retry our draft later this week on FantasyAuctioneer. If it goes well, I’ll update this review. Otherwise, we’ll be looking elsewhere next year, hopefully at ESPN.com.

Update: Well, at least they care about their customers. We received an apology from the owner of the site, as well as a refund and a free draft both this year and next. Very nice. Last week had more traffic and no issues, so something happened this week. They claim it’s not normal. I’d give them the benefit of the doubt as most people I know like their stuff. I’ll still post an update after Wednesday’s second attempt.

Update 2: I take it back. Aside from a little lagginess in the app, the draft went very well. It’s a lot of fun doing this, though getting together in person is still better. The app has almost all of the right tools and has a few small bugs. None of them get in the way of enjoying the draft. The sound cues are good, too. Overall, I’m happy with the experience there.

I probably shouldn’t comment on this because of what I do, so I won’t. I will say, go read this: Judge: Fantasy leagues may use MLB names, stats

Fantasy baseball leagues are allowed to use player names and statistics without licensing agreements because they are not the intellectual property of Major League Baseball, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

Baseball and its players have no right to prevent the use of names and playing records, U.S. District Court Judge Mary Ann Medler in St. Louis ruled in a 49-page summary judgment.

St. Louis-based CBC Distribution and Marketing Inc. filed a lawsuit against MLB after CBC was denied a new licensing agreement with the baseball players’ association giving it the rights to player profiles and statistics.

Major League Baseball claimed that intellectual property laws and so-called “right of publicity” make it illegal for fantasy leagues to make money off the identities and stats of professional players.

But even if the players could claim the right of publicity against commercial ventures by others, Medler wrote, the First Amendment takes precedent because CBC, which runs CDM Fantasy Sports, is disseminating the same statistical information found in newspapers every day.

“The names and playing records of major league baseball players as used in CBC’s fantasy games are not copyrightable,” Medler wrote. “Therefore, federal copyright law does not pre-empt the players’ claimed right of publicity.”

The ruling brings some relief to more than 300 businesses that run online fantasy leagues and have awaited the outcome of the lawsuit. In fantasy sports leagues, fans draft major leaguers and teams win or lose based on the statistical success of the actual players in major league games.

It wasn’t immediately clear what impact the ruling would have on existing agreements, such as the ones MLB has with CBS Sportsline.com, Yahoo Inc., ESPN.com and others. MLB also may appeal; a spokesman for the league did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

An ESPN spokesperson said Monday that the company would have no comment on the ruling.