For years, baseball cards have helped fans express their devotion to their sports heroes. Now, an inventor with a love of baseball promises to update the age-old pastime in a highly computerized fashion.

It all began when Marty Marion, an advertising executive named after a St. Louis Cardinals shortstop of the 1940s and 50s, was on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. Sitting next to him was a 7-year-old kid who spent the entire flight playing with his space alien trading card. Marion watched the boy repeatedly animate and flip the card in the air. Eventually, he realized that for the kid, the card was a true-to-life friend. "That's when I thought it would be a great idea if I could make trading cards come to life electronically. I quickly started to work on the idea of taking video and audio and embedding it on a trading card on a computer," Marion says.