Citizens Bank Park will be brighter and louder when the Phillies — and the fans — return to South Philadelphia for the 22nd season in stadium history on Monday afternoon.
The team has added LED displays along the facings of the upper decks, a new light show for home runs and other big moments and an improved sound system, the Phillies unveiled on Friday evening at their annual ballpark preview event. Additionally, the old-school rotating advertising boards on the field level, such as the one on the backstop behind home plate, have been swapped out in favor of digital boards.
These features will be revamped, modern changes for the beloved retro-classic ballpark that opened in 2004. They’ll be quite noticeable for anyone attending a Phillies game in 2025. The team hopes these modifications will enhance the fan experience as the sports world continues to shift to be more technological.
“We have an incredible home field advantage,” Michael Harris, the Phillies’ vice president of marketing and government affairs, told Phillies Nation from the CP Rankin Club behind home plate at Citizens Bank Park. “The atmosphere is electric. Philadelphia fans are as good as it comes. Anything we can do to amp it up even more will always be an objective.”
The Phillies installed a combined 6,800 feet of LED displays to the second and third decks that essentially wrap around the entire perimeter of the stadium’s foul territory. The new displays extend into fair territory in left field on the second level and in right field on the third level. Replacing the old sectional boards that showed pitch counts, line scores, ads and other information, the displays will have much more room for full-color graphics and will show advanced statistics as well.
The LED displays will also sync up with the rest of the ballpark for the Phillies’ new “Xfinity Home Run Takeover” to take place after home runs and wins. The displays around the ballpark, the stadium lights, the main scoreboard in left field, the Liberty Bell in right-center field and the sound system with 28 added subwoofers will all come together to put on a unique light show after each Phillies homer.
“It just elevates that atmosphere tied to it, and the imagery and the lighting that can get tied to that moment, or a Phillies win, whatever that might look like,” Brian Fling, the team’s vice president of corporate partnerships, said. “And I think with our partners, it gives us a lot more flexibility to do some different things.”
As Fling mentioned, the organization’s business partnerships also play a big role in these changes. Last year, the Phillies added more ads around the field and ditched their throwback out-of-town scoreboard in right field for a digital board that rotates between scores, metrics, graphics and, of course, ads. The new displays on the upper decks will clearly add more advertising space, and the “Home Run Takeover” comes with a glaring new promotional addition.
An Xfinity “X” logo has been placed in deep center field, a bright visual above the brick-and-ivy batter’s eye. It will flash during the light show when the Phillies hit a home run and remain lit up with a white outline during the rest of the game, but the team doesn’t anticipate it being an issue for hitters.
“Once you get about 25 feet off the ground from a straight line-of-sight perspective, then you don’t have a whole lot of problems,” Fling said. “And this sits well up above that level.”
The logo is fairly central to the action, and it may be a bit jarring to the fans to see an ad — especially a lit one — in that spot. The Phillies believe it works as a compromise.
“I think it’s a sign of the times, quite frankly,” Harris said. “And yes, the Xfinity sign is in a very high-visible location. The fans will see it, but everything’s a little bit of a give and take. And again, you just have to adjust. The way that we approached things 20 years ago is not the way that we approach them now. So I would argue that, yes, there may be some more ads, but it’s done in a tasteful way. We try to balance everything appropriately.”
As for other ads, the field-level boards that manually rotated between sponsors were taken out for digital ones. Behind home plate, there now sits a 45-foot LED board that will show two 10-foot sections of ads, separated by digital “ivy.” Like the out-of-town scoreboard that was removed last season, the old ad boards on the field were original to the stadium. Citizens Bank Park has become a lot more digital, and some fans may contest that they’re missing out on some of the classic ballpark feel.
Harris acknowledged that shift, but he still feels that “modernizing” the stadium is the best path forward. The Phillies believe fans will enjoy seeing more advanced stats, more technology and a full-stadium light show that brings the “wow factor.” They’ll bet on those features outweighing the negatives of change.
“There’s always a nostalgia to baseball, right? And you want to maintain the integrity of that as much as you can. But you also have to adapt. You have to adjust. … At the end of the day, we’re sacrificing a little nostalgia, but we think the upside and the benefit supersedes that exponentially, and that’s why we made a decision.”
