Angels Star Slams Astros Left Field Scoreboard After Taylor Ward Injury

Adell spoke to Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register, who covers the Angels and was on the trip with the team. Adell did not hold back when he was asked about the incident and the metal scoreboard in left field.

“He’s (Ward) doing what he’s supposed to do,” Adell said. “He’s being aggressive on a play. At the bottom line, and I’ve talked about this before, there should be no out-of-town metal scoreboard anywhere on the baseball field. It’s the big leagues. This [expletive deleted] is ridiculous. A guy goes back to make a play, and he’s got to worry about a metal fence. That’s crazy. So that’s my honest opinion about it. He did everything he could to make a player, and he gets beat up by something that’s beyond controllable.”

Fletcher reported that Adell had a run-in with the same wall in 2021, which caused him to pull an oblique and miss six weeks.

“At what point is it just not acceptable anymore? I don’t know. In my opinion,” he said.

The metal scoreboard in left field is at the base of the Crawford Boxes. The scoreboard, which has been a part of the park since it opened, is meant to be a nod to the out-of-town scoreboards of older ballparks, most of which featured out-of-town scoreboards that were manually operated. The scoreboards came back into vogue in the 1990s.

Not all new ballparks have the metal out-of-town scoreboards. Some have taken to using digital out-of-town scoreboards that feature padding and are more forgiving to outfielders. Others don’t have them at all and have opted to place them in other parts of the ballpark that are away from the outfield wall. Other older parks, such as Fenway Park in Boston, still have metal out-of-town scoreboards.

The wall at Daikin Park is a bit different. Fenway’s scoreboard is basically flush with the wall. While the scoreboard at Daikin is flush with the wall it sets in, the wall drops back toward the visiting team’s bullpen, creating a corner that players like Ward must navigate.