Every athletic director and every parks director asking this question wants a single number, and every honest answer starts by explaining why one number does not exist. A baseball scoreboard is not a catalogue item that ships in a box at a fixed price. It is a cabinet built to a size, filled with the digits the game needs, wired to a control console, mounted on posts set in the ground beyond the outfield fence, and delivered to a particular address. Change any of those and the quote changes with it.

What follows is the useful version of the answer. Instead of a price table that would be wrong the moment you read it, this guide walks through the decisions that move a baseball scoreboard quote up or down, and shows what our own record says about the choices ballparks actually make. Every specification quoted here comes from the product pages on this site. Every count comes from Electro-Mech's sales and shipping records.

Why There Is No Price List on This Page

Electro-Mech has manufactured scoreboards in Wrightsville, Georgia since 1963, and in all that time the company has never published a price list. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight, and it holds for a practical reason: the scoreboard is usually the predictable part of the project, and the parts that are not predictable are the ones that decide what a program actually pays.

Two leagues can order the identical cabinet in the same week. One is replacing a scoreboard on posts that are already standing behind the outfield fence, on a field with power at the concession stand, forty minutes from a sign company that does this work every month. The other is putting a scoreboard where none has ever been, on a field with no service nearby, in a jurisdiction that wants a permit and a review before anything goes in the ground. The equipment line on those two quotes matches. The projects do not.

A published price would therefore be right for almost nobody. What we can do instead is be exact about the variables, which is what the rest of this page is for.

What Actually Sets the Price of a Baseball Scoreboard

Across the baseball line, five variables account for nearly all of the spread between a modest order and a large one:

• The size of the cabinet. Electro-Mech baseball scoreboards run from 6 ft. x 3 ft. to 36 ft. x 10 ft. That is a range from 18 square feet of face to 360 - a twentyfold difference in the object itself.
• The height of the digits. Baseball digits on our scoreboards run from 11 in. to 24 in. Taller digits mean a taller cabinet, more segments to drive, and more structure to hold it all.
• How much of the game it shows. Runs and Inning is the short version. Runs by Inning across a full line score, with Total Hits, Total Errors and the Position of the Fielder charged with an error, is a much larger scoreboard, and Ball, Strike and Out Counts, Pitch Count, Pitch Speed and Batter Number each take their own space on the face.
• Everything else that ships with it. Timer displays, auxiliary cabinets and locker room clocks are separate products with their own lines on a quote. Sound systems and video displays are quoted separately and are not scoreboards at all.
• The site work at your field. Posts, concrete, trenching, a crane or hoist for the lift, and the electrician who terminates the power. None of that is on the scoreboard quote, and at some fields it is the larger half of the project.

Notice what is not on that list. There is no good, better, best tier, and there is no premium construction grade that costs more for the same size. The cabinets are aluminum across the line. What you are paying for is area, digit height, how much of the game the face has to carry, and the work at your field.

How Cabinet Size and Digit Height Change the Number

Size is the first question a sales representative will ask, and it is the one that moves a quote the most. The table below is a ladder through the baseball line as published on this site, from the smallest permanently installed cabinet to the largest. Weight is worth reading closely: it is the clearest single measure of how much scoreboard you are buying, and it is also what decides how the thing gets lifted into place on installation day.

Three things in that table are worth pausing on.

The largest baseball scoreboard Electro-Mech makes weighs 1,100 lbs. It is also the heaviest scoreboard the company builds for any sport. Weight matters to your project because it decides the lift: a 78 lb. cabinet and an 1,100 lb. cabinet are different days of work, with different equipment on site, and the difference shows up in the installer's number rather than ours.

A bigger cabinet is not automatically a bigger electrical job. The LX1070 is a 16 ft. x 5 ft. scoreboard drawing 1.1 amps - the same current as the 10 ft. x 5 ft. LX1060, because both carry the same count of 18 in. digits spread over more or less aluminum. What raises the current is more lit digits, not more square feet, which is why the line score models jump to 4.0 and 5.3 amps.

Digit heights come in sets on the larger cabinets. A scoreboard listed at 24 in., 18 in., 15 in. uses the tallest digits for Runs, the next size for the counts a spectator checks constantly, and the smallest for the inning-by-inning line. That is why the wider cabinets are also the taller ones.

What the Scoreboard Has to Show, and What That Adds

Baseball asks more of a scoreboard face than most sports do, and this is the variable that separates two cabinets of similar size on a quote. Four levels, in the order they add area:

• Runs, Inning, and the counts. The core of the line. Runs for each team, the Inning, and Ball, Strike and Out Counts. On our smaller scoreboards the counts are bullet-style LED clusters rather than digits, which is how a 6 ft. x 3 ft. cabinet still shows a complete game state.
• A Timer. Most of the baseball line can be ordered with a timer, and the consoles are ready for one even on the simplest MM-style package. The LX1340 carries a 2-Digit Timer with a bullet that blinks once a second while the clock runs; where the timer sits in a separate cabinet, the LX1062 and LX1064 are built to match the width of the scoreboard you already have.
• Pitch Count, Pitch Speed, Batter Number, Hit/Error/Fielder. These are configuration choices, not upgrades bolted on afterwards. The LX113x series takes the LX1030 layout and adds two feet of cabinet for a Pitch Count, a Timer, or both. The LX173x series offers seven standard arrangements built around the same idea.
• A full line score. The LX175x series shows Runs for each of ten Innings alongside Total Runs, Total Hits, Total Errors and the Position of the Fielder who commits an error, with the Ball, Strike and Out Counts in 18 in. digits. That is the 26 ft. x 9 ft. end of the line, and it is a different order of magnitude from Runs and Inning.

The practical consequence for a budget is that the question "how big a scoreboard do we need" is really two questions. How far away is the farthest seat, which sets digit height, and how much of the game do we want on the face, which sets the width. A park that wants a full line score at a small field ends up with a wide cabinet and modest digits; a park that wants Runs and Inning read from 300 feet ends up with a narrow cabinet and tall ones.

One caution on viewing distance, because it decides the digit height and therefore the cabinet: our own guidance is roughly 25 feet of viewing distance per inch of digit height. On the smallest scoreboard in the line, the LX1050, we recommend keeping the viewing distance under 250 feet, because the captions on a 6 ft. x 3 ft. face are short.

What Electronic Team Name Panels Add

Electronic team name panels put HOME and the visiting team's name on the scoreboard as lit characters that can be changed from the console, instead of painted lettering that cannot. On the baseball line they are a less common choice than on football, where nearly every order carries them, but they are available across the range and they change the electrical picture more than any other option on the scoreboard itself.

The scale of the change, in the client's own figures: an LX1750 draws 636 watts, and an LX1750 with electronic team names draws 1,236 watts - very nearly double. A specification quoted for a base model does not carry over to its variants, so the figure to plan the circuit around is the one on the spec sheet for the exact model and variant you are ordering, and the console needs its own circuit besides.

Sound systems and video displays are a different matter. They are separate products, they are quoted separately, and they are the reason a ballpark project sometimes needs heavier service than anything on this page would suggest. If your project includes one, the electrical scope follows that product, not the scoreboard.

Wired or Wireless: What the Control Choice Changes

The console that runs the scoreboard reaches it one of two ways, and the choice shows up in the project cost mostly through the trenching it does or does not require. On a ballpark that distance is usually longer than on a football field, because the scoreboard sits beyond the outfield fence and the console sits behind home plate.

ScoreLink is our wireless option. It is a radio link between the console and the scoreboard, available on all our models, with a working range of about 750 feet. It is not a control system and it is not a scoreboard model - it is the communication path. Roughly four out of five orders now go this way, which tells you how strongly buyers weigh not digging a trench across a field.

The wired alternative is a shielded two-conductor cable with a drain line, purchased separately from the scoreboard. Our outdoor cable carries a burial quality jacket, which is the part worth knowing: the buried portion of the run does not need conduit. You can trench it and lay the cable directly in the dirt, and use conduit only where the cable comes up and is exposed. Cable runs are supported to 1,000 feet, farther than the wireless link reaches - which matters at a field where the console-to-scoreboard distance runs long.

One rule matters more than the rest here: control cable and power do not share a conduit. If your contractor proposes running both in one, that is a specification to correct before anything goes in the ground.

What Ships With the Scoreboard, and What Does Not

A quote reads differently once you know which items are already inside the scoreboard line and which arrive as their own products. This is where two quotes for "the same scoreboard" stop matching.

The console comes with the scoreboard, and it is already chosen for you. Electro-Mech builds two: the full-featured 37-key MP-Series and the simplified 15-key MM-Series. Every scoreboard model is matched to the console that suits it, so there is nothing to select and no codes to enter - both are configured for the sport. Most of the smaller baseball scoreboards ship with the MM-Series, and that is the console the majority of ballparks run for years without wanting anything else.

Upgrading the console runs one way. An MM-Series can be upgraded to an MP-Series; an MP-Series cannot be downgraded. Two things on the MP-Series matter to a baseball buyer in particular: it is the console that supports electronic team names, and it carries 50 levels of brightness control and internal memory that holds the game state through a power cut. Two of its headline features do not apply here at all - Practice Segment Timer mode and tenth-of-a-second timing are not available for baseball - so paying for the larger console to get them would be paying for nothing.

ID panels are a separate decision with an unusual economic argument. They are the panels around the scoreboard that carry a mascot, a school name or a sponsor's message, and on a ballpark scoreboard they are often the largest visible part of the sign. They are also the standard way programs offset what they spend: the area beside the scoreboard is where the crowd is already looking, and local sponsors pay for it. Several models are built to accept them by design, and the ordering suffixes reflect that - an -L, -R or -LR model carries a built-in identification panel on the left, the right, or both, which adds feet of cabinet and changes weight and mounting hardware. That is a different product from the base model, not a decoration on top of it.

These arrive separately or not at all:

• The control cable. Purchased separately, and only if you are not going wireless.
• ScoreLink. The wireless option, available on every model, ordered with the scoreboard.
• A separate timer cabinet. Where the timer does not fit the main face, the LX1062 and LX1064 are built to match the width of the scoreboard beside them.
• A radar gun kit, if the scoreboard is showing Pitch Speed.
• Everything structural. Posts, concrete, the lift and the electrical work are local, and they are the reason two identical orders end up at different totals.

What the Record Shows Ballparks Actually Buy

Most buying guides describe what a manufacturer would like to sell. This section describes what was actually ordered. Electro-Mech's sales and shipping records contain 9,275 baseball orders from 7,488 organizations across all 50 states, shipped between 1998 and 2025. Counted the way the company counts them: one entry per organization, model and city. Baseball is 38 percent of the company's sales, second only to basketball.

Two patterns in that record are useful to anyone building a budget.

First, the ballpark standard is a modest cabinet. The three most ordered models in the entire baseball line are the 10 ft. x 5 ft. LX1060, the 8 ft. x 4 ft. LX1030 and the 6 ft. x 3 ft. LX1050. Together they account for 3,362 of the 9,275 entries - more than a third of everything shipped for baseball, and none of them is bigger than 50 square feet of face. These counts are model families rather than single part numbers: the record spells the same display both with and without the LX prefix, and both spellings are counted together here.

Second, the line score scoreboard is a minority purchase. The LX175x and LX173x series together account for 1,002 entries, about 11 percent of the record. If you had assumed that a serious baseball program buys the full line score, the record says otherwise: most buy Runs, Inning and the counts, and put the money into a cabinet their crowd can read.

The geography is concentrated in the southeast, which reflects where the company has sold for six decades rather than where baseball is played: Georgia leads with 1,850 entries, followed by Florida with 1,000, North Carolina with 748, Alabama with 742, Tennessee with 587 and South Carolina with 505. Pennsylvania, at 341, is the strongest state outside the region, and Texas sits at 297.

One caution about reading any of this too literally. These are sales and shipping records. They say what was ordered and where it was sent, not what is standing today, and a shipping address is sometimes a dealer rather than the field itself. The counts are reliable as a picture of demand. They are not a census of scoreboards in service.

What the Installation Adds to the Project

The scoreboard quote covers the scoreboard. The rest of the project - posts, concrete, the lift, the electrician - is arranged locally, and it is the part where two otherwise identical orders stop resembling each other. Knowing how the mounting actually works is the fastest way to have a useful conversation with whoever will do it.

In the overwhelming majority of outdoor projects, the method is simple and old: the installer digs holes, sets the posts in them so they stand up out of the ground like poles, pours the concrete footings, waits for them to set, and then clamps the scoreboard cabinets to the posts. There are no anchor bolts holding the cabinet, and there is no bolt pattern to match. Anchor bolts appear only in the uncommon case where the footings contain anchoring hardware and the posts sit entirely above ground.

Our outdoor manuals give the sequence, and the parts most often skipped are the ones that cost time when they go wrong:

• Build temporary wooden framing to hold the posts plumb while the concrete cures. Posts that drift while setting are a problem no amount of care later will fix.
• Start with the top cabinet and work down.
• Stand the cabinet on the ground with the posts behind it before lifting anything.
• While it is still on the ground, assemble the mounting clamps for that cabinet - two per post - and attach them loosely, with the rods and brackets wrapping around the backs of the posts.
• Lift the cabinet to height with a crane or hoist.
• Tighten the clamps.
• Repeat for each cabinet below it.

Two practical notes follow from that sequence. A crane or hoist is required for anything but the smallest cabinets, so access to the site matters, and at a ballpark it matters more than at a football field: the scoreboard usually stands beyond the outfield fence, and a truck that cannot get past the fence line turns a straightforward lift into a long day. And the physical installation itself is not a long job. Once the concrete has cured, it is common to handle the installation of a baseball scoreboard in a single day.

Footings, Permits, and When an Engineer Is Involved

What decides how substantial the footings need to be is the surface area of the sign and the local wind load requirement, not the weight of the cabinet and not the latitude of the field. Coastal wind ratings drive deeper footings far more often than cold winters do.

Whether you need a building permit depends entirely on the jurisdiction, and in many places a scoreboard goes up without one. Where a permit is required, the local code may or may not have anything to say about the structure or the electrical detail. What does come up occasionally is a requirement that a locally licensed Professional Engineer review the mounting structure and footings, provide wind load calculations, and stamp the drawings. To put the frequency in perspective, a licensed PE is brought in on fewer than one hundred Electro-Mech projects a year.

Determining whether a PE is required on your project is the customer's responsibility, not the manufacturer's. Where one is needed, Electro-Mech can usually help by working with the PE directly to keep the process moving. That is a service the company facilitates, not a document it issues.

Power, and Where It Comes From

For an outdoor scoreboard, the usual arrangement is a disconnect switch mounted on one of the support posts, branching from an externally mounted panel that also serves field lighting and other equipment. Power does not come from the press box; the press box holds the console, which is a different thing entirely. The terminal block where the alternating current is connected is inside the scoreboard cabinet itself, not in a separate enclosure on the ground.

A locally licensed electrician normally terminates the power at the panel. Before that electrician leaves the site, run a full operational test with the console: every digit, the counts, the timer if you ordered one, and the horn. Problems found while the truck is still in the parking lot are problems that get solved that day.

Before the Scoreboard Arrives

The single most useful thing to prepare before delivery is unglamorous: a clean, dry, secure place to store the scoreboard and its accessories until installation day. Shipments frequently arrive before the site is ready, and that is fine as long as somewhere sensible is waiting for them. Note any shipping damage on the delivery receipt before signing it.

As for who does the work: in some regions Electro-Mech has long-standing relationships with people who specialize in scoreboard installation and service, and a sales representative can point you to them. Beyond the reach of those partners, a local sign company is generally the right resource. Erecting a sign on posts is ordinary work for them.

How to Get a Real Number for Your Field

A quote comes back faster and closer to final when the request carries the specifics. Have these ready:

• The level of play and the field. Little league, high school, travel club or college, and how far the farthest seat sits from where the scoreboard will stand.
• What the face has to show. Runs and Inning, or Pitch Count, or a full line score with Hits and Errors. This is the decision that most changes which model you are quoting.
• New posts or existing ones. Replacing a scoreboard on posts already in the ground is a different project from starting with an empty outfield.
• A timer, or no timer. Most of the line can carry one, either in the scoreboard or in a matching cabinet beside it.
• Wireless or cable. If cable, the distance from the console behind home plate to the scoreboard beyond the fence, and whether a trench can be dug along that path.
• Site access and storage. Whether a crane can reach the location past the outfield fence, and where the shipment will wait if it arrives early.

Current models and their full specifications live on this site and are kept up to date there. Bring the model number you are considering, or the field dimensions and the level of play, and let the sales representative work back to a model from that.

A baseball scoreboard stays at a field for a long time, and the decisions that set its price are mostly decisions about the field rather than the product catalogue: how far the back row sits, how much of the game the crowd expects to see on the face, whether the posts are already standing, and whether a truck can get past the outfield fence. Answer those, and the number stops being mysterious.

Ready to get a real number for your facility? Request a quote from Electro-Mech and include your field dimensions, your mounting situation, and what you want the scoreboard to show.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a high school baseball scoreboard cost?

Electro-Mech does not publish scoreboard prices and quotes each project individually. What sets the figure is the size of the cabinet, the height of the digits, how much of the game the face has to show, any additional displays such as a timer, and the site work at your field. A request that names those specifics comes back with a number quickly.

What is the smallest baseball scoreboard Electro-Mech makes?

For permanently installed outdoor scoreboards the LX1050 is as small as they come: a 6 ft. x 3 ft. cabinet with 15 in. digits, weighing 78 lbs. and drawing 0.8 amps at 120 VAC. Because its captions are short, we recommend it only where the viewing distance stays under 250 feet.

What is the largest baseball scoreboard Electro-Mech makes?

The LX1786 measures 36 ft. x 10 ft., carries digits of 24 in., 18 in. and 15 in., weighs 1,100 lbs. and draws 6.6 amps at 120 VAC. It is the heaviest cabinet Electro-Mech builds for any sport.

Which baseball scoreboards show a pitch count?

Pitch Count is a configuration, not an accessory added later. The LX113x series takes the 8 ft. x 4 ft. LX1030 layout and adds two feet of cabinet for a Pitch Count, a Timer, or both. The LX173x series offers seven standard arrangements that include Pitch Count, Pitch Speed, Batter Number and Hit/Error/Fielder Position.

What does a line score scoreboard show that a smaller one does not?

The LX175x series shows Runs for each of ten Innings alongside Total Runs, Total Hits, Total Errors and the Position of the Fielder charged with an error, with Ball, Strike and Out Counts in 18 in. digits. That is a 26 ft. x 9 ft. cabinet weighing 800 lbs., against 160 lbs. for the 10 ft. x 5 ft. scoreboard most ballparks order.

Does a baseball scoreboard need special electrical service?

No. Every scoreboard in the baseball line runs on ordinary 120 VAC service, from 0.8 amps on the smallest to 6.6 amps on the largest. Electronic team names very nearly double the draw of the model they are added to, and the control console needs its own circuit. Heavier requirements at a ballpark come from accessories such as sound systems and video displays, which are separate products.

How far can the console be from the scoreboard?

With the ScoreLink wireless option, about 750 feet. With cable, runs are supported to 1,000 feet. The cable is a shielded two-conductor cable with a drain line, purchased separately, and its burial quality jacket means the buried portion of the run does not need conduit. Control cable and power are never run in the same conduit.

Can the same scoreboard be used for softball?

Many models in this line are built for both. The LX1340 and LX1341, for example, are baseball and softball scoreboards on the same 10 ft. x 5 ft. cabinet. What changes between the two sports is the caption set and the number of innings, not the cabinet or the mounting.

Do I need a permit to install a baseball scoreboard?

It depends on the jurisdiction, and in many places no permit is required. Where one is, the local building code may also call for a locally licensed Professional Engineer to review the mounting structure and footings and stamp the drawings. That happens on fewer than one hundred Electro-Mech projects a year. Confirming the local requirement is the customer's responsibility, and the building department is the place to ask first.

How long does the installation take?

Once the concrete footings have cured, it is common to complete the installation of a baseball scoreboard in a single day. The waiting is in the concrete, and in any permit the jurisdiction requires before work starts.