It was four days before the opening – a period of over 48 months. Ή 1,470 days. At that time, Alejandro Kirk had made exactly three appearances on a professional plate. Alek Manoah was starting his second year of college. Yusei Kikuchi made a track for the Seibu Lions. A 19-year-old Vladimir Guerrero Jr. had not played another game over the high A. A lot has changed since then. The team on the field, absolutely. But also the Rogers Center itself, which has undergone extensive upgrades in recent years, in view of a much larger scale renovation that is scheduled to begin next off-season. When fans finally fill the building again this weekend to welcome a World Series contender home, they will do so under MLB’s newest videoboard. Under a completely replaced lighting system. And while watching the game on an age-old play surface, the most advanced and forgiving turf the Rogers Center has ever presented. Here’s a look at what’s new – and how it all came together. The scoreboard The older MLB video board has been replaced with a giant 8,076-square-foot screen that is the same width as the previous one at its heart (258 feet), but is much taller, adding 14 feet in height. It is also 2.5 times the resolution of the previous board – which was installed before the 2005 season – running in 1080p HD. Preparations are underway for the Blue Jays start day at the Rogers Center. The new HD 1080p scoreboard is over 8,000 square feet. New LED lights throughout the building as well. pic.twitter.com/kRbK3S20Q7 – Arden Swelling (@ArdenSwelling) April 6, 2022 You will notice a pair of new ribbons extending from both sides of the main screen, wrapping 1,334 feet along the level 300 front and completing an almost complete circle around the bottom bowl. More recently installed screens near the dirt poles and built into the exterior walls have also been replaced, allowing resolutions and colors to be consistent throughout the building. “We got all the real estate we could get without affecting the hotel rooms. “Now it’s the 10th biggest standings in the league,” said Mike Christiansen, technical production manager at Rogers Center. “We have more properties to allow fans to see more statistics during the game, to show them bigger reps, better camera shots. It is more in line with what they have seen in other parks. “ The process began with the demolition of the previous scoreboard, the wooden supports that held it high, and the Sightlines restaurant, which ran around level 300 of the stadium and was removed to allow for this 14-foot increase. A new steel support structure was installed in its place, with some beams running between the hotel rooms overlooking George Springer’s shoulders. The new video, meanwhile, was being torn to pieces in South Dakota by Daktronics, the electronics company behind some of North America’s largest sports stadium facilities, such as the 62,350-square-foot halo video board at Mercedes Stadium. Benz in Atlanta and MLB’s largest at Progressive Field in Cleveland. Toronto’s new scoreboard was gradually delivered in 8×8 foot pieces and hoisted with a crane to fit into something equivalent to a giant, electronic patchwork. And just 77 days after the removal of the first piece of the old scoreboard, the new installation was fully assembled, including the huge amount of wiring and alignment work that had to be completed behind the scenes. Of course, the installation of the infrastructure was only the beginning. Rogers Center’s team of designers and technicians have spent many months creating a whole new set of in-game presentations, a daunting task, given the vast scale and unique layout of the videoboard. What seems seamless to you on the day of the match, with the statistics flowing naturally around the field and the graphics flying from one side of the board to the other, is the product of countless hours of design and live testing. “You have to be precise in the pixels,” says Christiansen. “So until you know exactly where things are going to go and how big things can be based on real laser measurements before construction starts, you’re not exactly sure how to design for a canvas like this. ” But it also opens the door to a wide range of possibilities. You can expect to see a lot more statistics and information appearing on the Rogers Center videoboard this season. much cleaner repetitions, too. Each of the more than 5,000 units in the scoreboard measures 14 inches by 14 inches and each individual pixel is just 10 millimeters from the next. At an extremely granular level, there is one pixel for every inch of the videoboard. This makes it an extremely powerful tool for Christiansen and his team to play and learn how to maximize throughout the season. If it’s a little overwhelming at first. “It’s a learning curve for us technicians and operators, because you’re working with a canvas eight times the size of a regular TV network,” says Christiansen. So you learn how to plan for it, how to work for it. Now you come up with this weird custom shape that you will not find anywhere else in the world. It is unique in this building. That means it has to be uniquely designed and unique, too. “ Lights Under the videoboard, players will enjoy a brand new lighting that will see the Rogers Center do much more with much less. The building has replaced a HID 900 luminaire that was originally installed in 2011 with a 532 LED luminaire that will cost three times less per year in hydraulic consumption. This means that the club is already enjoying a return on investment from the installation of the new system, which will eventually pay for itself. And demanding fans will notice the difference. While the old HID luminaires would illuminate around a general area of the Rogers Center lawn, the LEDs are much more directional and designed to illuminate an exact spot on the field. This reduces the amount of luminaires required for the brightness of the same space, while providing a noticeable increase in light quality. “It simply came to our notice then. “When you’re out on the pitch, you feel like daylight,” said Paul Zuschlag, Rogers Center’s senior director of facility maintenance. “That was the intention – to get a truer light on the pitch. No brighter, just more consistent. ” One side effect of upgrading the system’s directionality, however, was the darkness of the seats surrounding the pitch. This led the Blue Jays to install new lighting in the stands themselves to keep these areas as bright as possible for incoming and outgoing fans. It was a particular concern at level 500, which was already below the previous luminaires and now its lighting has been widely upgraded. The lights themselves were provided by Musco, the same company with which the Blue Jays worked together to remake Buffalo’s Sahlen Field to host MLB games over the past two seasons. The rear infrastructure — which has been in place since the stadium opened in 1989 — has also been completely replaced, with a huge operation fixing 2.5 km of new fiber optics and 40,000 feet of copper wire running through the building and feeding the Rogers Center main room. level 300 behind the house plate. Meanwhile, each bullpen is equipped with its own independent, proprietary luminaires. And a fleet of 16 upward-pointing ball detectors have been installed around level 200, illuminating the Rogers Center roof when closed and about 400 feet of night sky when open, allowing players to get a better view of the high-flying flying balls. The system also includes 48 color-changing RGBA (red, green, blue, orange) luminaires, making the Rogers Center one of only two MLB facilities – Miami LoanDepot Park is the other, as it is also off-season – with the possibility of cascading millions of colors throughout its environment. This means that fans can expect dramatic light emissions before and during the game, as well as screens for specific events, such as a red and white theme for Canada Day or a rainbow during Pride week. And whoever hits the first Blue Jays home series of the season this weekend will welcome some stunning new holiday effects. “I’m really excited about the color-changing lights,” says Zuschlag. “It’s a really unique feature that no one else in MLB had before. We’re really excited about it.” It would not be possible with the old system all or nothing, which took 15 minutes for each array of light bulbs on the field to cool enough to reactivate. But now, the Rogers Center fixtures are all independently controlled and can be switched on and off momentarily, which will greatly increase the number of scenes the Blue Jays’s day staff can produce. It will allow the lights to be tuned to the music coming from an updated audio system to be installed in 2021. Eventually, everything will be linked to the presentations in the new video panel. The lighting replacement process started in September and took until mid-March to be completed and put into operation with MLB. A group of 10 machines, several of which were double-tied to straps hanging from the roof, dropped each old HID component one by one and replaced it with a new LED. Removing the old light bulbs was not so bad – they weighed about half a kilo. But the new LEDs? These are 50-pound, closed luminaires. It took the team a week to install each array of new lights. But no one was more excited to see every new …
