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Royals scoreboard is a vision of the future
By SAM MELLINGERThe Kansas City Star
There are 40-some screens in here, most of them showing four smaller displays. Operating the Royals’ new $8.3 million Crown Vision scoreboard requires a staff of 17, a beautiful and hectic symphony of button pushing and barked commands and language you’d want to keep your small child away from.
It happens behind the metal door at the end of a hallway on the fourth floor. The first man you see here gives you a warning.
“Be careful,” he says. “It’s a buzz saw in there.”
Chris DeRuyscher is the Royals’ director of game entertainment, and from the looks of it, you could replace “game entertainment” with “four hours of the new 8,900-square foot high-definition video board” and be more accurate.
Someone asked DeRuyscher last week what he would be thinking at 3:10 Tuesday afternoon, when the first pitch was scheduled at the Royals’ home opener. He said something about being able to relax, being relieved that he and his staff had made it that far. But right now the scoreboard clock reads 3:10, and there is no relief in sight.
Certainly no sense of relaxation.
“Somebody press that ‘easy button,’ ” one of the controllers says.
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Longtime Royals scout Art Stewart sat in the Buck O’Neil seat on Tuesday and was one of the first to be shown on the new board — 105 feet high and 85 feet wide of high-definition glory.
“Boy, you could see birthmarks and everything there, huh?” he says. “It picks up everything.”
John Buck is the Royals’ catcher, and goodness knows he has enough going on during games. He needs distractions like Amy Winehouse needs a keg and usually does a pretty good job of avoiding them.
Not on Tuesday.
“I’ve got to admit,” he says, “it was like it was coming down my throat. On a couple of the warm-up pitches, I found myself peeking up there. I’ve never done that, but it feels like it’s right in my lap.”
The square footage is roughly equivalent to two mansions, so there is more than enough room for detailed information. The in-game display has line score, pitch counts, radar gun, defensive alignment, offensive lineup, extended stats and room left over for personal information and pictures.
Some fans learned that “LOB” stands for men left on base, and several wondered out loud what “OPS” means — it’s on-base plus slugging percentage.
Trevor Hamilton took off early from work to catch the Royals’ home opener and said the giant video board made sitting in the cold a little more comfortable, and dealing with the minor inconveniences of the ongoing renovation a little easier.
He says the picture was clearer than he expected, but wanted to request that the Royals stop doing the “Kiss Cam” because “it’s gross” in enormous HD.
He was kidding.
“I can’t believe how cool it is,” he says. “I’d say it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, but that would make me sound like a loser, wouldn’t it?”
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It’s the fifth inning now, though DeRuyscher could swear it’s the eighth or ninth.
“To tell you the truth,” one of his coworkers says, “I wasn’t expecting to get this far. There’s just so much going on.”
The video control room has two levels and is about as big as a decent-sized living room. The logistics of running the new board means there will be 10 more people in here this year than last year.
They have had six months of preparation and at least one “rehearsal,” but there are still minor glitches. Nothing major, but one person familiar with new boards like this says it usually takes about four months of game use before the controllers feel comfortable.
One of the controllers, for instance, didn’t know that replays could be shown on just the top half of the board between batters.
“The unfortunate thing about baseball is you have to be on your A-game the very first day of the year,” DeRuyscher says. “Not that we wouldn’t anyway, but our Super Bowl is the first game of the year.”
At least for now, it is the biggest high-definition video screen in the world, replacing the one at the University of Texas’ football stadium, which replaced the one at the Dolphins’ NFL stadium.
They were all built by the same company, Daktronics. The Crown Vision board took about two months to finish and is the first to go more vertical than horizontal.
That different setup means all sorts of unique challenges, from how the camera guys shoot to how the people in this room put it all together.
To hang out in this room is to pick up on a whole different set of jargon. The most-used words are “double” and “check,” which is how they realized just in time that someone forgot to pick up a sandwich and chips to show off for the camera when they gave away some Gates.
This must be similar to what it feels like in an air traffic control tower, with the added bonus that it’s far less dangerous.
It is a constant direction of cameras — stand by six, dissolve to six…stand by three, transition three — and computer-generated graphics that require 30-some hands working on 40-some computer screens.
This is still very much a work in progress and will be for a while. But one day into it, DeRuyscher says he’s happy so far.
“We are going to get better, every game,” he says, before laughing at himself. “Listen to me, I sound like I’m a player here talking, but I think we’re going to get better and better every game.”