Anchorage Daily News

Forget about who's on first. The looming question this year at Mulcahy Stadium is "Who's winning?"

Followed closely by "What inning is it?" and "How many outs are there?" and "How many balls and strikes?"

The park's new scoreboard isn't working, which has left fans -- and probably some players and coaches -- in the dark this week as the Alaska Baseball League kicks off another season.

If all goes according to plans, a necessary part should arrive from the Lower 48 today. Then it's up to the city to install it.

Officials with the Anchorage Bucs, the team that helped buy and install the scoreboard before the 2007 season, said it probably hasn't been working since August. But it wasn't until Sunday -- the day before the season-opener between the Bucs and Anchorage Glacier Pilots -- that anyone realized it wasn't lighting up.

Gary Lichtenstein, the Bucs' director of ballpark operations, said damage occurred in August after the end of the ABL and American Legion seasons. While digging a water line, workers splintered a power source and set off sparks that fried a receiver inside the scoreboard, he said.

Lichtenstein said the crew was either city workers or workers contracted to do the job by the city. Al Pickett, an electrician with the city's Maintenance and Operations department, said he wasn't sure if the crew had been hired by the Bucs or the city's Parks and Recreation department.

Regardless, he said, "When the part's in, we'll install it."

The Bucs and Pilots hope that means the Mulcahy scoreboard will light up again by Monday.

Until then, the teams are asking their public-address announcers to provide more information than usual. Besides announcing each batter and hyping various promotions, announcers are being asked to give the score at the end of each half inning and to make frequent mention of the number of outs and how many balls and strikes a batter has.

That created a bit of a problem at Tuesday's game between the Bucs and the Elmendorf Eagles, an overmatched adult-league team from the Air Force base that suffered a 16-2 beating.

"Dave Foreman, our public-address announcer, did not want to announce the 16-2 score too often because it was Military Appreciation Night, and he thought that was not a good way to show our appreciation to the military," Lichtenstein said.

Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4309.

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