PHILADELPHIA — It poured on the night the Phillies unveiled PhanaVision, delaying the game 40 years ago and perhaps delivering a message from the baseball gods after yet another pillar of the sanctum was destroyed. The Phillies were already playing on fake grass while wearing maroon instead of red and being cheered by a mascot. Now they had the biggest video board in baseball — a 31-by-42-foot screen in the 700 level of Veterans Stadium. It was a whole new ballgame.
“Whatever became of baseball for baseball’s sake?” Stan Hochman wrote under the headline “Lights out for baseball purists” a week before PhanaVison debuted. “Whatever happened to peanuts, popcorn, and Cracker Jacks?”
At Thursday’s home opener, the Phillies will unveil their newest video board, a screen so big that it makes the Vet’s TV look like rabbit ears. The new PhanaVision is 152 feet wide and 86 feet tall, 77% larger than the one it replaced, and as the team says, “the size of 516 Phillie Phanatics.”
It’s huge and the controversy that greeted the original PhanaVision in June of 1983 is gone. A humongous TV is now just part of the ballgame.
“Think about how far the home experience has come,” said Sean Walker, the Phillies’ vice president and chief technology officer. “You have 85-inch TVs, HD broadcasts. It’s so comfortable to be at home that you’re almost competing with that experience. The audio-visual component is such a huge part of the game and we think this is transformative for the fans. The show is such a big aspect of going to a baseball game versus that era where the baseball itself was the experience because you couldn’t get it at home that way.”
Finding the screen
Baseball’s first video board was introduced in 1980 at Dodger Stadium and was followed soon after by the Mets. Bill Giles, the Phillies president who introduced the Phanatic in 1978, saw those screens.
“He had to have one,” said Dave Abramson, who oversaw the introduction in 1983. “It’s as simple as that.”
Dennis Lehman, then the team’s marketing director, recruited Abramson, then a director at Channel 17, to help the Phils in 1981 find the right screen. A year later, Panasonic put on the full-court press and flew the Phils’ contingent to Japan to see one.
“Panasonic rolled out the red carpet for us,” Abramson said. “Took us to the finest restaurants in Tokyo, flew us on a 747 commuter flight with 500 people on a one-hour flight to Osaka to see one they had installed there. We met the president of Panasonic, ushered into this elegant boardroom with attendants opening doors wearing white gloves. It’s like we were royalty.
“Panasonic thought Bill was carrying a checkbook with him and was going to write a check right there. Bill wasn’t ready for that. He’s allergic to writing checks.”
In Osaka, the Phils watched a screen in action at a game and brought a box of team-signed baseballs as gifts for the executives of the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes.
“They’re looking at them and then they say, ‘Which one is Pete Rose?’” Abramson said. “I picked it up, looked at it, and realized Pete hadn’t signed the balls. So I found the most illegible scrawl on the baseball and pointed to that one. ‘That’s Pete Rose.’ ‘Oh, thank you.’”
Need for an upgrade
The Phillies last upgraded PhanaVision in 2011 when they installed what was then the biggest in the National League. That board, Walker said, was beginning to show its age. The Phillies decided two years ago that PhanaVision needed a facelift.
“Our board was at the end of life at that time,” Walker said. “We knew we had to do something. It was very evident that that board had served us well since 2011 but it was time for a replacement, for sure — in size but also the viewing quality and the angles. There’s just been such advancements in LED technology over the past 10 years that we’re now at something that can easily carry the organization another 10 to 15 years.”
The new PhanaVision is more than 10,000 square feet bigger than Citizens Bank Park’s original screen, which entertained fans for the ballpark’s first seven seasons.
The Phillies considered other locations for the new video board, which is designed by Daktronics, but decided to keep it in left field. They didn’t want to change the look of the ballpark, including the possibility of moving the light-up Liberty Bell. They also had to make sure that their bigger board didn’t block the view of the Center City skyline.
“You could certainly get to the point of it being too big, I think,” Walker said. “Had we gone with our largest option, I think it would’ve appeared almost like the entire sky was a board.”
Headed home
The Phillies contingent was upgraded to first class for the flight home from Japan and their decision was practically sealed. A Panasonic video board would be sitting a year later in the 700 level after the company cut the Phils a deal when they had to remove a video board from a Middle Eastern soccer stadium because the screen was installed wrong. It was the Phils’ if they could pick up.
Just like the Phillie Phanatic, the board became an integral part of a Phillies game. It’s not a scoreboard. It’s PhanaVision.
“The name Dennis and I wanted was PhillieVision,” Abramson said. “But Bill said, ‘No. I’m saving that for something.’ I think he was saving that for a possible Phillies-owned sports channel. So PhanaVision was a pretty easy second choice.”
“I always wanted to entertain the fans in any way I could,” Giles said. “Whether that be by bringing in Kite Man or the Great Wallenda or whatever. We weren’t winning enough games in the early 1970s and I thought of every crazy thought I could to get people to come to a game once.
“The theory was if I got them there once and they felt entertained, then they could go home after a ballgame with their kids and have the kids say ‘Mom and Dad, that was fun. Let’s go back.’ The whole concept was to build a staircase for marketing. Get people to come out once, entertain them, and then eventually they’ll become a season-ticket holder.”
Hochman wrote his column 40 years ago, after the Phils previewed PhanaVision for the press a week before that rain-soaked game. He spoke to Abramson, who told the longtime Daily News sports columnist that he hoped PhanaVision would be able to bring the game to the fans in the 700 level with replays of things they could not see and then entertain them between innings. After 40 years, PhanaVision has done that. And no one is complaining about it.
“I hope they just consider it to be an incredible, additive experience to an already incredible park,” Walker said. “We experienced last fall what CBP is at its most magical. It was incredible here. Our fans can keep bringing that atmosphere and this will only enhance it. I just think it will be part of the show.”
