Fan Club

In what has the potential to be the coolest sport innovation since the print-your-own tickets issued by Ticketmaster, the Schaumburg Flyers — an independent minor league team in northern Illinois — will soon unveil “Fan Club: Reality Baseball” to allow fans to manage the team during the second half of the season.

The web site, produced by LivePlanet and Microsoft, will be a wealth of information and interactivity that allows fans to have direct input into managing the game. The site is also expected to include live video streams of Flyers games, which owner Rich Ehrenreich hopes will make Schaumburg home to the first national minor league team. (BTW, LivePlanet is the production company behind Bravo’s Project Greenlight and will be working with Disney to produce “Tron 2.0” for the big screen. They are also working with Amp’d Mobile and KnowlegeWhere to create “PhoneTag,” a social networking game using mobile devices to do a form of Paintball game.)

The idea is actually an old one, dreamt up by promotional super-dude Bill Veeck in the 1950s. Veeck — who once signed and played the shortest person he could find to draw walks, planted the ivy in Wrigley Field, and was also partly responsible for Disco Demolition Night at old Comiskey — came up with Grandstand Manager’s Day for a St. Louis Browns game against the Philadelphia Athletics. Veeck allowed fans sitting in a special section to hold up cards with “Yes” or “No” printed on it, voting on almost every major decision involving game strategy.