‘Like it’s always been there’: New video boards bring modern enhancement to traditional game day experience at Avista Stadium

There have been plenty of upgrades and renovations to Avista Stadium over the past few seasons as the Spokane Indians organization and Spokane County – owners of the 67-year-old facility – fulfilled requirements to remain compliant with MLB’s Player Development Contract each affiliate had to sign after the restructuring of the minor leagues a few years ago.

Most of those upgrades were largely to improve conditions regarding the players’ health, safety and development – a new playing surface, LED lighting, expanded dugouts and locker rooms, padded outfield and foul territory walls, indoor batting cages and workout facility.

But the most recent upgrade will be the most noticeable to fans sitting in the seats. And that is precisely the point. The Indians open the 2026 season on Friday against the Everett AquaSox and will debut their long-awaited jumbo digital video board hovering above the left centerfield wall, and a new digital scoreboard, replacing the old dot-matrix board over the right centerfield wall.

With everything that will go into the production, it’s almost like opening up a new Broadway play.

Tosh Semlacher, in his second season with the club as director of corporate partnerships, was tabbed to direct the project.

“The No. 1 thing I’ve been thinking about is, this team’s been here for 120-plus years but no one has been to a game in Spokane like this,” he said. “And that’s kind of what we’re excited to show. Generations of families have grown up coming to Spokane Indians baseball games. But none of them have been to a game like this, starting on Friday, so that’s really exciting for us.”

The video board is big – 26 feet tall and 60 feet wide, adorned with full LED neon signage with the team’s logo and wordmarks above. The digital scoreboard is slightly bigger than its predecessor, but the display can change to graphics with the punch of a button and change back to the line score just as easily.

The video board will be able to show static displays such as the batting order and stat graphics. But it will also show replays, in-stadium contests and, of course, promotions and advertisements.

And Semlacher promised “a few surprises up our sleeve.”

“I’m excited more than I am nervous, just to see people’s reactions when they first see it,” Semlacher said. “I think we have a strong enough plan to be more conservative than to kind of say, ‘Hey, look at me.’ We’re just trying to supplement an already quality show.”

Both structures are made up of a couple of hundred modules, roughly 1-by-3 feet, that are stacked together and linked to display cohesive images and video. Modules can be swapped out easily if a pixel goes out, or if there’s damage from a home run hitting the screen.

In addition to the video and scoreboards, the organization replaced and upgraded the antiquated sound system – adding more than 60 speakers throughout the ballpark, on the concourse and the seating bowl. All told, the new entertainment system came at a cost of roughly $1.65 million, according to team president Chris Duff.

The project was originally slated for opening day 2024 but delayed twice by vendor issues.

“This has been a project we’ve been planning on, you know, for multiple years,” Duff said. “The short answer is, yeah, it felt like one of those things that dragged on. … But we’re really happy with where we landed, both from a vendor standpoint, but also just the product that we received I think is really impressive. I think the fans are going to be really impressed with it as well.”

The delays might have been a blessing in disguise.

“It’s given us a little more time to put our team in place, to be in a position from a front office standpoint and from a game-day standpoint too, to put on a really good show with it as well,” Duff said. “While I would have loved to have had it a year or two ago, I don’t know that we were quite ready. But now I think we’ve got the right people in place in our front office to put us in a really good spot, to use the tools as they’re meant to be used, and put on a great show.”

The team, led by Semlacher, has been designing graphics packages “for months,” but has only recently been able to see the fruits of that labor in practice – construction was finished just a few weeks ago and the board was “plugged in” on March 19.

Along with their other duties, Semlacher, Landon Shigeta (partner services and public relations coordinator) and Aaron Croom (partner services coordinator) comprise the three full-time Indians staff members on the recently named “digital experience team.” They will be joined by a half-dozen seasonal workers on a nightly basis – P.A. announcer, music director, camera operators, stadium hosts – to provide an enhanced entertainment product to go along with the baseball viewing experience.

“Once it was here, the main focus was making sure that everything we had developed actually looked good,” Semlacher said. “And so that’s what we spent our first few weeks doing – figuring out if it was feasible to do the ideas that we had. Because when we were doing it (on laptops), it seems a little easier, and we just had a little monitor. … The hardest part has been building everything we could to make sure we’re helping the show. And then on Friday, I hope it does.”

“I am really proud of what (the digital experience team) has been able to accomplish this offseason,” Duff said. “I think people are going to be pretty blown away by what they see on the screen and working in conjunction with the sound system.”

Semlacher, with lots of input from others, was the principle designer of the system. He wanted a classic look that was “as clean as possible,” while maintaining the traditional look and feel of the ballpark. He drew on how parks like the Sacramento River Cats’ Sutter Health Park and even Fenway Park and Wrigley Field incorporated modern scoreboards into older stadiums.

“With me having a bit more of a baseball background, it enabled me to maybe have a better understanding there, and then we just kind of played around with it,” Semlacher said. “Considering the age of our team and stadium, I thought it was really cool to somehow put us in the historical kind of realm to make it clean, utilizing the tan and blue color schemes and making it feel a little older, but also having that modern feel to it.

“We tried to make it feel like it’s always been there.”

Everyone within the organization felt the responsibility of incorporating the scoreboard as organically as possible into the stadium. Still, with the size and ever-glowing colors emanating from the two boards, the change in scenery is obvious.

“We’re always going to pride ourselves on the face-to-face customer service,” Duff said. “We’re really looking at the video board as an enhancement to the fan experience. It’s not going to replace anything that we have done and will continue to do.”

“This organization has been lauded on how successful the show it provides to the region, and how awesome it is,” Semlacher said. “People come here and they’re like, ‘Hey, this is just a fantastic place to watch a baseball game.’ So our goal with having a brand new toy wasn’t to take away from that. It was to basically supplement it. … Let’s take what’s already amazing and let’s just try to make it a little bit more. And maybe bring a modern kind of piece to it.”