The Guitar That Lit the Sky: Nashville’s Iconic Scoreboard

Photos Courtesy of Richard Smith

“The scoreboard is perhaps the best thing that we have ever done here,” former Nashville Sounds co-owner Walter Nipper said in 1993.

The guitar-shaped videoboard at First Tennessee Park in Nashville, Tennessee, is one of minor league baseball’s most iconic features and easily the focal point of the home of the Nashville Sounds Triple-A baseball team.

Sounds original owner, Larry Schmittou, came up with the concept after paying off the 15-year loan at the stadium; he figured the stadium needed something to stay ahead of the curve at the time, when it was still among the elite in the minor leagues. He submitted his idea to Fair-Play Scoreboards on a guitar-shaped scoreboard that would be the first of its kind.

His original idea had the musical instrument standing upright, but Schmittou then turned it on its side. It could now keep score, welcome groups, announce birthdays and anniversaries, and provide information. The scoreboard’s neck displayed the line score.

“It was more popular than I ever dreamed,” Schmittou told The Tennessean in April 2013. “I wasn’t looking for it to become a historical monument; I was just wanting to get information to our fans using a design that would make a sort of a signature for us being the Music City.”

The original guitar-shape scoreboard at Greer Stadium, ​File Photo.

The $500,000 scoreboard was hauled into town by eight truckloads and put together piece by piece in the time of the home opener against the Iowa Cubs on April 8, 1993. It stood 53 feet tall and stretched 115 feet wide. An ad in The Tennessean invited people to come out to watch the new scoreboard “light up the sky with fireworks.”

It quickly became one of the most popular scoreboards in all of minor league baseball. The stadium’s distinctive feature was hard to miss while attending games.

It grabbed my attention as a young teenager visiting Greer for the first time the following season. On a side note, the old scoreboard would be used to display out-of-town scores before being covered up for additional advertising space.

It did need some upgrading, which could be tedious before the current ownership, a third-party vendor, was in charge of changing the copious number of light bulbs, which was rather costly. That changed during the $2.25 million upgrades to the ballpark in 2009 that resulted in a new paint job and the Sounds staff changing the lights- a combination of both 30- and 40-watt incandescent bulbs.

Roughly 5-10 bulbs would need to be replaced before each home stand, costing a few hundred dollars each season. However, the paint job, retouched before each season, took a little longer for staff members to complete.

When the Sounds announced that they were finally moving from Greer for the 2015 season, it was already past its due date as a minor league ballpark; it was hoped that the scoreboard would move to the new venue.

“Our wishful thinking is that we will figure out a way to take it down and move it to the new ballpark when the time comes,” said former Sounds GM Brad Tammen in The Tennessean in July of 2013. “It could be a stadium marquee or something else. But we wanted to be part of the new park.”

​Photo by Dave Cottenie, Stadium Journey

The old scoreboard did not move with the club for a list of reasons. It was a 22-year-old structure that was rusting away, had no video capabilities, and was falling apart. It would have to be taken apart and put back together again, making it a rather difficult and costly project.

When First Horizon Park, then known as First Tennessee Park, debuted, so did a new, state-of-the-art guitar-shaped scoreboard. In June of 2014, TS Sports Panasonic constructed the new scoreboard that would be the largest in minor league baseball. Instead of changing light bulbs, a crew of 15 people operates it by capturing videos, keeping statistics, operating effects, and managing the audio.

The $2 million video board stretched 142 feet wide, stood 55 feet high, and was 12.5 feet above the concourse adjacent to The Band Box in the right-center field. It displays 860 32-inch television screens and engages fans through social media and display advertisements. It can even revert to the former scoreboard for Throwback Thursday games.

​Photo Courtesy of Studio Delger

Today, the former guitar-shaped scoreboard has found new life and is the centerpiece of the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood. It was purchased for $54,815  at an auction by Chicago real estate developer AJ Capital Partners in 2019.

The piece of Nashville history is located in The Outfield, an area of repurposed shipping containers with art, and serves as an outdoor area for live music, movies, exhibits, food festivals, and yoga. There are also a couple of old shipping containers painted to look like giant amplifiers.

Both scoreboards will remain in town for the foreseeable future, and what started as a unique way to add identity to a stadium turned into one of the minor leagues' and one of Nashville’s most treasured symbols.

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Follow all of Marc’s stadium journeys on Twitter @ballparkhunter and his YouTube channel. Email at Marc.Viquez@stadiumjourney.com