I received an email recently advertising the Official New York City Shop’s line of NYPD sweatshirts and NY Fire Department T-shirts.

Normally I would probably have deleted the item, but I just happened to notice the extension on the sender’s email was mlb.com, which got me wondering…

Turns out MLB Advanced Media, the interactive arm of Major League Baseball, has taken its aggressive web hosting expertise far beyond the walls of Baseball and its Players Association. The NYC shop is just one of a variety of Web sites MLB.com is hosting.

The site counts Major League Soccer and several of its teams, the U.S. Figure Skating Association, and other Olympic sports among its roster. Then there are the musicians’ Web sites, including Queen Latifah, Jimmy Buffett, and Bob Marley, said Jim Gallagher, senior vice president of corporate communications for MLB Advanced Media.

“We’ve been lucky enough over the course of the past six years to build a technological platform to host others’ sites,” Gallagher said.

The site even handled the streaming of the first three rounds of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for CBS SportsLine.com this year, Gallagher said.

With its early foray into streaming live games and offering historical highlights, MLB Advanced Media was able to prove how capable it was at handling large and complex amounts of material. Gallagher said typically the other sports entities and musicians split the revenue generated by their Web sites with MLB.com.

“This is all incremental revenue streams. What it does is bring lots of visitors to these sites," Gallagher said. “We’re most interested in doing work for people who promote their own brand. They come to someone who’s got a proven track record [at web hosting].”