And it was all set to a rendition of “The Eyes of Texas.”įifteen years later in 1980, the Los Angeles Dodgers hit a new plateau in scoreboard design with its 875-square foot video Mitsubishi Diamond Vision board at Dodger Stadium. It contained 50,000 lights and featured an animated display of cowboys, ricocheting bullets, flags, steers and fireworks after every Astros home run or win. In 1965 the Houston Astrodome - nicknamed the eighth wonder of the world - opened with a 474-foot wide scoreboard that was then the largest anywhere in sports. ![]() (Photo by Louis Requena/Pictorial Parade/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)įive years later Dykes would get an answer, although he probably didn’t like it. Former White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes was not a fan of his team’s new contraption asking, only slightly rhetorically, “what’s baseball coming to?” A floodlit baseball match in progress between the Boston Red Sox and home team the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York City, July 1959. In 1960, the Chicago White Sox unveiled an exploding scoreboard at Comiskey Park, which featured multi-colored pinwheels and blasted fireworks after every White Sox home run. Along the way, some scoreboards - usually at Major League Baseball Stadiums - advanced beyond simply displaying game information to becoming entertainment boxes of their own. ![]() ![]() Clearly, there was a desire - if not an outright need - on the part of fans to know what was happening with their favorite team, whether they were at the stadiums or elsewhere.Īlthough manual scoreboards remained – and some are still in use today in venerable stadiums such as Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway Park in Boston – by the late 1930s, electronic scoreboards were becoming the norm.Īnd they were getting improvements, too, for example the ability to keep time and provide other useful information including down and distance for football, batting lineups with player numbers, and scores and pitchers from other games for baseball.Īnd over the years, the electronic wizardry of scoreboards improved with the implementation of incandescent lights in the 1940s followed by LED lights in the 1970s, meaning brighter, more colorful scoreboards. Using information sent to them by telegraph, board operators at newspapers would post scores and other game information on their electronic scoreboards and people would stand outside newspaper offices to get the latest updates. The scoreboards weren’t a big hit with teams, however, because many baseball executives feared the new electric gizmos might reduce the sale of popular hand-held scorecards. Baird, created an electric baseball scoreboard that tracked balls, strikes and outs. And scoreboards erected in baseball outfields worked great – unless your seat was in the outfield bleachers.īut scoreboards began their race to the future in earnest in 1908 when Chicago inventor, George A. (Photo by Nathan/Archive Photos/Getty Images)įootball scoreboards were often located in end zones making them difficult to see for fans sitting at the opposite end of the stadium. A Long Island, NY professional women’s baseball team game in 1953. But that didn’t always mean that was the optimal spot. The boards were manually operated and helped fans in large stadiums at least know whether their team was winning or losing.īuilt strictly for function with little regard for aesthetics - or the respective stadium’s design - the classic scoreboards were typically located where the most fans could see them. ![]() The advent of the modern-day scoreboard began in the 1890s with the unveiling of football scoreboards at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Most didn’t keep time or provide any extraneous information. Men climbed ladders to change the score, quarter or inning by using chalk or hanging numbers. Early scoreboards were basic in their operation. Scoreboards were always part of the fan experience, a simple way to assuage sporting events attendees desire to keep score. Like the field of architecture itself, the roots of the now-ubiquitous stadium scoreboard reach all the way back to the days of ancient Greece and Rome.īut in the intervening 1,300-years, scoreboards have evolved from the pedestrian, manually-operated single-use tally boards that were often a nondescript afterthought, to gigantic and dazzling digital wonders that have become as integral a part of stadium design as retractable roofs and luxury suites.
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