Mental Floss: 100 Years of Scoreboard Watching

Here's a great post from the mental_floss Blog, chronicling the technical evolution of video scoreboards over the past century or so. The article is full of great photos, and here are some highlights:

In 1908, Chicago inventor George A. Baird developed an electric baseball scoreboard that recorded balls, strikes, and outs. While Baird’s invention was tested by Boston’s two major league clubs, it didn’t immediately catch on across the league. Team owners were hesitant to provide information to fans for fear that it would cut into the sale of scorecards, but the electric scoreboard signaled an eventual shift in the in-game experience at stadiums and arenas. Over the next two decades, manually operated scoreboards evolved to feature more information than the score. Lineups with player names and numbers were displayed, along with scores and pitchers’ numbers from games around the league...

When Yankee Stadium opened in 1923, it featured a large manually operated scoreboard in right field that was visible to every spectator in the park. In 1950, the Yankees unveiled an electric scoreboard that the team called “the most efficient scoreboard ever built and, in general, a big stride forward.” The Yankees’ new scoreboard was operated by two men as opposed to five and featured a non-glare enamel covering...

Before the 1959 season, the Yankees made another upgrade, installing the first scoreboard to feature a changeable message display. The New York Times, which dubbed the new scoreboard “the electronic miracle,” provided the specifics: “The board will contain 11,210 lamps with a wattage of 115,000, 619,000 feet of electric cable, will weigh 25 tons (not including the steel supporting structure), will have more than 4,860 push buttons on the master control console and will have a total face area of 4,782 square feet.”

Wrigley Field’s iconic 89-foot scoreboard was built in 1937 under the direction of flamboyant club treasurer and future White Sox owner Bill Veeck, whose father was team president until he died in 1933. Most of the original Wrigley Field scoreboard, which still stands today, is manually operated, but the batter’s number, balls, strikes, and outs are displayed electronically in the center portion of the board. The original control panel is still in use.

“What’s baseball coming to?”
That’s what former White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes asked after Comiskey Park’s exploding scoreboard, which featured multi-colored pinwheels and shot off fireworks after every home run by a Chicago player, was unveiled in 1960. “All I know is that if I was a pitcher whose home run ball had started that Fourth of July celebration, I’d fire my next pitch at the head of the next hitter,” Dykes told a reporter. While some opponents resented the extravagant display, which was another one of Veeck’s ideas, the unique scoreboard design was retained when Chicago’s current stadium opened in 1991.

Bigger and Better
When the Houston Astrodome opened in 1965, its 474-foot wide scoreboard was the largest in all of sports. The scoreboard featured 50,000 lights that erupted in a 45-second animated display of cowboys, ricocheting bullets, flags, steers, and fireworks after every Astros home run or victory. The display was set to a soundtrack that included “The Eyes of Texas.”

Diamond Vision
The Los Angeles Dodgers unveiled a $3 million, 875-square foot video board at the 1980 All-Star Game. Mitsubishi’s Diamond Vision, which enabled operators to show replays using a VCR, was the first video board of its kind and a sign of things to come. Similar video boards soon became standard in stadiums and arenas, as the resolution and functionality of the screens improved and Sony entered the market with its popular JumboTron. In 2009, the Dallas Cowboys unveiled the world’s largest high-definition video display, an LED scoreboard developed by Mitsubishi.
Other Iconic Baseball Scoreboards

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