The Akron RubberDucks, the Double-A baseball affiliate of the Cleveland Guardians, have a secret.
At their Canal Park stadium, fans of the team can watch big-screen replays and see their favorite players’ stats in part thanks to a Guardians rival — the Detroit Tigers.
Since last year, when the Tigers replaced their scoreboard, the Michigan team has been sending pieces of their old technology to Akron.
It wasn’t a prank or payback for the Guardians knocking the Tigers out of the 2024 postseason. Instead, the pieces of the scoreboard were coming as replacement parts for the minor league RubberDucks’ own scoreboard, which was aging and out of date.
Soon, the Akron team will no longer have to depend on the Tigers’ largesse. Canal Park plans to replace the scoreboard before April 8’s opening day. Jim Pfander, the RubberDucks’ president and general manager, said the $4 million cost will be privately funded.
“We think it’s going to be great; the fans are going to love it,” Pfander said. “They’re going to have a crystal-clear view of what’s going on.”
In addition to being used during RubberDucks’ baseball games, Pfander said the new scoreboard will allow the parents of high school and college students who play at the stadium to have a better view — and take better pictures — of their children when they’re shown on screen. It will also allow more non-baseball events, like movie nights, to better make use of the space.
Pfander said details of the new scoreboard’s dimensions are still being worked out, but it will be larger than the existing scoreboard. Both the existing and the new scoreboards are made by Daktronics.
Team owner Ken Babby has invested $14 million in the city-owned stadium since 2013, Pfander said. The scoreboard upgrade will be financed with bonds let by the Summit County Development Finance Authority then paid back through the team’s ownership. The bond deal hasn’t closed yet.
The existing scoreboard was new in 2013 and was expected to last between 10 and 15 years, Pfander said. Then, it was one of the largest scoreboards in Double-A baseball and used LED lights — an upgrade from its predecessors. Pfander said the original scoreboard, from 1997, was like a Lite-Brite toy. It was later upgraded with a video screen. Now, he said, everything is digital.
The new scoreboard is expected to last about a decade.
“We want to reinvest in the stadium for the fan experience,” he said. “It’ll look crisp; it’ll look clear.”
Upgraded bathrooms also in the works
In addition to the new scoreboard, the city has proposed spending $1 million as part of its capital budget to rehabilitate Canal Park’s public restrooms, waterproof part of the stadium and perhaps patch the roof.
City Council members on Monday agreed to advertise for bids then enter a contract to upgrade the bathrooms. The project is expected to cost around $450,000 and will improve all seven public restrooms on the stadium’s concourse level — three men’s, three women’s and one family restroom, said Chris Ludle, Akron’s director of public service.
While the toilets themselves will remain, the rest of the bathrooms will be spruced up with new epoxy flooring, painted walls, LED lights, sinks, hand dryers and partitions.
The improvements are “going to really pop,” Ludle said. “You won’t have to touch anything.”
The city will also pay to waterproof the foul — or fowl, as the RubberDucks call it — territory near the left field line. Ludle said the concrete needs to be sealed to keep water from going underneath the concourse. A gutter system that directs any water that does go under the concourse has to be upgraded.
Additionally, if there is an immediate need to patch any part of the roof, that work will be prioritized.
The work comes on top of other improvements to the stadium the city has made in the past several years, Ludle said. This includes new seats, LED lights and netting to protect those sitting near fowl territory, as well as an upgraded heating and air conditioning system to improve the stadium’s energy efficiency and eliminate heat pumps.
Since Canal Park was built in the late 1990s, the upgrades are “something you constantly have to do,” Ludle said.
“There’s always little things you’re always doing,” he said.