New 2009 Scoreboard Stuff

I was at the exhibition finale today in Arlington, and of course, I couldn’t resist taking a bunch of pictures of the new scoreboard stuff. Given this is a long article with a lot of pictures, I’m breaking most of the content off onto a secondary page, so if you’re reading this on a feed reader or something, you will have to click through to the main website to see everything.

GENERAL COMMENTS
First off, it all looks pretty darned cool, but I do have one complaint about the new system over the old. There’s no one static, non changing place, you can go to check the “Balls, Strikes, & Outs”. I’m referring to these now no longer in existence boards.

Since all the new boards seem to serve multiple functions, there’s no one place you can look at all the time, and be sure of the current game situation. That was something I struggled with during the game a few times. Normally I’m invested in it, as I score games I go to, but since I had my three year old and a 7 month pregnant wife with me, I was not going to score this one in case I had to be daddy. Which I did several times, but I was more interested in spending time with my family today than scoring the game. This is really my only negative about the new boards. I miss a static non changing board showing me balls, strikes, & outs. I don’t know if the system is open for tweaks, but if it is, this is the one I’d make. The closest there is for that is this shot which was taken from center field, but from where I was sitting (Sec 237), this isn’t completely visible, and it too is not showing this all of the time.

This is duplicated somewhat in the board that hangs at the bottom of the upper home run porch, but again – not there all the time. That’s a minor problem, IMO.

THE RIBBON

The ribbon goes all the way around the infield in the shot you can see here. For some reason, on the first base side, it doesn’t go all the way to the end of the cement lip. It’s almost as if one section is missing. See what I mean here. However, it’s a pretty impressive look for the Ballpark, as we’ve never seen this here in the previous 15 seasons played in the Ballpark in Arlington. There’s some random graphics, and things like floating Rangers logos like you see here and here.

THE RIBBON – PLAYER ANNOUNCEMENTS

During player announcements, names and numbers – and faces are on the ribbon. The faces look kind of funny, since they’re squashed into the little ribbon. The effect is not as cool on this static picture, it’s more impressive when it moves, so I’ve included video I took during the player intros. It’s shakycam stuff for sure, but it’s still pretty watchable, and gives you an idea of what player intros look like.

The player name tends to be repeated around the ribbon, as you can see in this shot of when Michael Young was up to bat.

THE RIBBON – ADVERTISEMENTS

Of course, one big thing the marketing team has to love about these new boards is a ton of new advertising space. While it is not constant, I did see a decent number of ads during the game. It wasn’t obnoxious, and truth be told, the ribbon was used mostly for baseball info, and various “rah rah” type of graphics. But there were a good amount of ads. One that was the biggest was one for Budweiser. All the boards at once showed what looked like beer, and then they all showed the Budweiser logo. See what I mean here:

THE LEFT FIELD BOARDS

First off, a little recall. This is what it used to look like:

This is what it looks like now..

It’s a major change. Forget the lack of the manual scoreboard, it’s just way more colorful than it ever was before. I mean, look at this:

The old pitcher balls, strikes, and total pitches, as well as the pitch speed are still here, and in the same place, but the board rotates out with other stuff. The video board generally from what I noticed showed the same stuff that is going on on the home run porch video board – you can now see things like the dancing hat shuffle. A lot of the advertising push for the new scoreboards make the claim that you will finally be able to see the stuff on the video board when sitting in right field now that you could never see before. But I’ll say this – there were several times I was watching the board in left, and I could not read the same advertising copy that I could read on the board on top of the home run porch. I don’t know if that’s because it was a day game, and there was too much sun glare or not, but it was rather hard to read text off that board in the video mode central part of it. Hopefully that plays differently in a night game. We shall see. But the overall effect is awesome. It’s way more colorful, there’s a ton more info, and the in game scores of other games are way more detailed than ever before. They’re not all there at once like they were in years gone by, but I think that’s an acceptable sacrifice. I mean how many people at the park really looked out there to see what the score of the Pirates/Nationals game was? Here’s one more shot of it I took before the game started showing you an “ad” for Dollar Hot dog night. Looks good to me.

SUMMARY

To sum it up, it’s a pretty cool upgrade to the ballpark. I was somewhat disappointed that the replay section of the new left field board is just as small as the video board on top of home run porch. I was hoping the ENTIRE board could be used for video replay. It may be possible, I haven’t talked to Chuck about it yet.

I think you’ll enjoy it, my complaints about this are small, and over time I’m sure I’ll get past it – I mean we’ve had 15 years of the old way, and one game (for me so far) with the new method. We’ll see.

Two more things below here. One is another embedded Youtube video showing part of the National anthem. They had every video board showing the waving American flag during this. Also during the home run Marlon Byrd hit, every single video board showed home run, and had some sort of electric lighting look to it. I didn’t capture that, as my little girl got all excited about the home run and fireworks, and I was really enjoying that moment, as you can see here.