The Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals lost 97 games in 2007, but they’ve topped the nation with their new stadium scoreboard.
At almost 9,000 square feet (85-by-105), the giant Daktronix screen is powered by a Ross Switcher and a couple of EVS replays, Deko 3000s for graphics and Pro-Bel routing gear. The towering board—the nation’s largest, according to Daktronix—debuted at the Royals’ home opener against the Yankees Tuesday at Kauffman Stadium.
“It was pretty awesome,” Chris DeRuyscher, director of game entertainment for the Royals, said Wednesday. “To see those things all come together after years of planning—it all came together yesterday and came out the way it was supposed to.
The screen, at 1584x1980, amounts to about two 16:9 screens on top of each other. “We basically challenged everybody to work together and open up some parameters because this aspect ratio is ridiculous,” he said.
He can go full-screen and dice it in other ways, with plenty of graphics, stats, and live out-of-town scores. During games, all three M/Es on the RossVision switcher are hot, he said.
Read more about the video screens’ debut here.
The $8 million-plus system board replaced a 17-year-old Sony. It’s part of a major renovation of Kauffman stadium that will continue into the 2009 season.
Across the country, a smaller but also impressive new HD board debuted at Nationals Park in Washington, baseball’s newest stadium. Read about that system in the April 14 issue of TV Technology.
