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PNC scoreboard gets up to speed, flashing stats and play-by-play
Thursday, April 19, 2001 By Cristina Rouvalis, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Inside the control room, workers furiously feed data into their laptop computers while eyeing a big, black monstrosity that has been keeping them up late into the night.
Next to them, a man scans a wall of TV screens and shouts out orders -- We're live. Dissolve. Roll it.
Deadline after deadline pushes in.
"Does anyone have an Advil?" asks a sleep-deprived Marty Corbett as he types data into his computer.
This is the place known as "scoreboard control" at PNC Park, and 17 people are trying to get the Pirates' new 56-by-140-foot scoreboard to behave the way it is supposed to -- mainly to spit out numbers for statistics-hungry baseball fans.
PNC Park has received glowing reviews, but some fans complained during the exhibition games and the first home stand that the hulking black scoreboard was stingy on the stats. Where are the previous at-bats, the batting averages and out-of-town scores?
It was a big letdown for the Pirates scoreboard staff, who had been laboring day and night to work out bugs in new software.
"We are the nicest ballpark in America," said Corbett, matrix board coordinator for the Pirates. "Everyone is looking at us to be top-notch and ready to go. We are having a few growing pains."
So the Monday night home game against the Astros was a big relief. The scoreboard spewed out statistics including previous at-bats and batting averages.
Plus, something new flashed on the screen. Every time announcer Tim DeBacco spoke, his words appeared as captions on the scoreboard. Videos, the national anthem and other parts of the program also were translated into captions. A software glitch had prevented the captions from appearing the first few games.
When the crowd heard the words "We direct your attention now to the playing field," Ed Fulesday typed the words into his stenotype machine. A mere second later, they popped up on the scoreboard.
Captions that say "catcher, No. 18, Jason Kendall" may be no big deal if you can hear. But for the estimated 10 percent of the population who are hearing-impaired, it can make the difference between being confused and following the game.
"Why alienate anyone from the ballpark?" says Steve Greenberg, the Pirates' vice president of new ballpark development. The Pirates are paying $35,000 to $40,000 for captioning at PNC Park, making it the only one in the majors besides Enron Field in Houston.
Fulesday, owner of AKF Reporters Inc., a court-reporting company, and a closed-captioning pioneer, listens intently through headphones as he transcribes the words of the announcer. He and the 16 other people in the scoreboard room sit next to the announcer's booth, behind home plate on the press level, a place off limits to fans.
Fulesday types away accurately, sometimes getting up to 260 words a minute. Then he lets out a groan when he notices that one of the answers to a trivia question, Ty Cobb, appears on the screen as Tie Kob. Fulesday had forgotten to enter the words Ty Cobb in his dictionary, which translates the phonetic words he enters into his machine into correct English.
It's an unforgiving profession, but he keeps typing, so intent that he doesn't even know the score of the game. His associate, Kevin Daniel, takes over just in time to do the challenge of the night -- caption the famed pierogi race, which starts as animation on the scoreboard and often ends with people in costumes running into the stadium.
"Have fun captioning that," says Alex Moser, coordinator of in-game entertainment for the Pirates, during the bottom of the fifth inning. "Do you have Pittsburghese?"
Daniel, who grew up in San Francisco, does great at winging the local argot for "and that," typing in "n' at." But he has less luck when he types in, "See yun's next time." The Pirates staff jokingly tells him it should be "yunz."
"I am not from Pittsburgh," he says with a laugh.
The caption-makers talk with Eric Wolff, manager of in-game entertainment, about how long to keep the captions up after a batter is announced. They agree to clear them after the first pitch.
Wolff is like the conductor of the scoreboard control room, a whirlwind of commands. He calls for "crowd shots," directs various cameras and, when Brian Giles is intentionally walked, he orders a chicken noise -- bawk, bawk, bawk.
After the Pirates win the game 3-0, he finally catches his breath. "Good job, everybody," he calls to his staff. "We are getting there."
But Wolff, who has been working 16-hour days and jokes that he's losing his hair, still has to keep fine-tuning the scoreboard so it will flash out-of-town scores, tally pitch counts and run new animations.
Peering out at the scoreboard looming in front of him, he says, "It's a work in progress."
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