It's fun to go to a sporting event. You get to watch elite athletes do things that we normal folk can't imagine doing. You can enjoy the energy of the crowd, the overpriced ballpark food and drink, and if you're really dedicated, you and your (likely inebriated) friends can collect a lot of empty beer cups and make a "cup snake" to pass the time as well. All of that is to say that us fans are better off in the stands than we are on the field -- we're not throwing touchdowns, hitting homers, or scoring goals. We're simply not as good as the players we're paying to see.

But when it comes to the managers and coaches? Maybe that's another story. Many fans -- myself often included -- think that at times, they'd be better strategists and tacticians than the people actually paid to do the job. But would we be? 

If one 1950s experiment is any guess, perhaps the answer is "yes."

The 1951 St. Louis Browns were one of the worst baseball teams of all time. Over a 154-game season, the Browns won only 52, ten fewer than the next-worst team. Few people even bothered to come to the Browns' 77 home games; they sold only 290,000 tickets over the course of the season. (The second-worst drawing team, the Boston Braves, had 487,000 fans attend their games -- and as a result, moved to Milwaukee just two years later.) As August approached and the season started to fade away, it was clear that the Browns weren't going to win many games -- and that fans weren't really interested in paying to watch them lose.

So Bill Veeck, the team's owner, decided to give the fans a more active role in the game. He made 4,000 of them the team's managers. But only for a day.

On August 15, 1951, the Browns took out an ad, seen here, in a local newspaper, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Fans were invited to fill out a short form (attached to the ad) outlining which players they'd use, if it were up to the individual fan. Any fan who returned a completed form was entered into a lottery with two lucky entrants selected as the in-uniform managers for the August 24th game. Those who weren't selected were given the chance to sit in a special section in the ballpark, dubbed "Manager's Row. Whenever the in-uniform fan/managers had to make a decision, they'd hold up a sign in front of the grandstand managers, asking what to do. The grandstand managers were given "yes" and "no" signs, as seen below, and could vote for what the team would do. (The team's actual manager, Zack Taylor, was effectively given the night off; per the ad, the team gave him a rocking chair and slippers and told him to just watch the game.)