Nielsen Ratings for Fantasy Baseball Sites ...

According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, nearly 20 million Americans are now playing fantasy sports with a total market estimated at more than $1.5 billion, including sponsorships, endorsements, contest management and advertising.

For those of you scoring at home, that's a lot of people ... and a crap-ton of money. Give your boss those statistics next time he catches you scouring the waiver wire at work.

Fantasy baseball, more so than any other rotisserie sport, has benefited greatly from the data storing spoils of the Internet revolution. (God bless you, Al Gore, for inventing the Internet). Given the sheer volume of players, games and extensive statkeeping baseball naturally engenders, fantasy baseball could never have grown as much as it has without the Internet.

In the spirit of Internet-based statistical analysis, let's take a look at the some of the most popular fantasy baseball websites in the world, according to Alexa.Com

According to the good people at Wikipedia, Alexa is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites.

They've got some pretty interesting stuff at Alexa. You can track website traffic by country, category and keyword. You can compare several websites at once and even produce nice, complicated graphs that would make CNBC stock market vixen Maria Bartiromo blush.

Let's take a look at some of the top fantasy baseball sites out there. For simplicity, I've filtered my search results to reflect web traffic originating in the United States.

Not surprisingly, the top five websites are some of the hobby's main league management portals. Site rankings are in parentheses. Keep in mind some of the sites (like Yahoo! and ESPN, for example) have content covering several different categories, not just fantasy baseball)

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball (2)
ESPN Fantasy Baseball (16)
Mlb.com - Official Site of Major League Baseball (124)
Sportsline.com - CBS SportsLine (133)
Fantasy Baseball - USA Today (201)
RotoWorld (1168, must be the new ads they're playing during the NBC sporting events)
Sporting News Fantasy Baseball Source (1,518)

In the grand scheme of things, that's a pretty darn good showing for fantasy sports, ... especially since most of the web traffic likely comes from one gender.

Here are some of the sites you might consider as "pure" fantasy baseball destinations.

Fantasy Baseball Cafe (12,539 a robust 2,175 in Austria)
Mockdraftcentral.com - Mock Draft Central (13,977)
FantasyBaseball.com (62,588, that's a pretty good name for a site about fantasy baseball)
Baseball HQ (20,839)
Crooked Pitch (74,752)
Fantasy Baseball Hub (91,865)
Baseball Fantasy Insider (139,180)
TG Fantasy Baseball (140,829)
Baseballnotebook.com - Baseball Notebook (175,417)
RotoChamps.com (181,336, a shocking 16,232 in Lebanon; Beirut must love its fantasy sports)

(drumroll please ...)

Fantasy Baseball Search (198,746)

Here are a few more for you to chew on.

RotoJunkie (246,693, yet 45,615 in baseball-friendly Venezuela)
FantasyBaseballMafia.com (250,570)
Fantasybaseballguy.com (573,604)

Alexa.Com keeps these stats so be sure to check back periodically to see how your favorite fantasy baseball sites rank.