August 17, 2026
There is a story Corey has been holding onto from his radio days. A concert was underway at the ballpark when the rain came down hard enough to send the crowd out of the field. Once it stopped, he looked toward the wet surface and saw Dan Mason pushing water away with a squeegee so people could get back to the show. The general manager of the Rochester Red Wings was doing grounds crew work. Of course he was.
Dan does not treat the story as exceptional. In minor league baseball, he says, every person in the office does a little of everything. Pull the tarp. Make hot dogs. Pour beer. Park cars. Handle a last minute problem. Make sure players, coaches, and fans have what they need. The title on his business card says general manager. His working title, he says, could be director of fun.
Dan started with the Red Wings as an intern. He tells college students that an internship is the best way to find out if a career is really right for them because you get to do a million different things. He was a sponge in those early years, learned the business from the ground up, and slowly worked through the organization.
He was 28 when Joel To Belli retired and the board gave him a chance to run his hometown team. He is now in his 37th season with the club. Early in his career, he imagined a path into another major league organization. Then he got married, had kids, and recognized that the job he really wanted was already in front of him. He wanted to be the general manager of the team he grew up watching.
That hometown commitment changes the job. The Red Wings are not just a tenant in a ballpark. The club has been part of Rochester since 1877. Rochester Community Baseball, the organization behind the team, was formed when Morrie Silver led a 1957 stock drive that brought the club back from the Cardinals. More than 8,000 people and organizations bought in. Dan says there is a Green Bay Packers feeling to it, a shared sense that the team belongs here.
Dan is blunt about the business. The game is the centerpiece, but the Red Wings are competing with every other way a Rochester family can spend a summer night. Movies. Golf. Boating. Miniature golf. Time is as valuable as entertainment dollars, and the team has to earn both.
So the club does not think of a season as 75 games. It thinks of it as 75 parties. From the minute a guest parks to the minute they leave, the staff is working on the experience. Tickets. Food. Spikes and Mitzi. Giveaways. Fireworks. Running the bases after the game. A parent may remember the player who hit the winning home run. Their kid may remember the mascot instead. Dan says the goal is simple: make memories for families, even on a night when the team loses.
Planning next year begins before the current season ends. With about 250 days to opening day, the Red Wings are already sorting the promotional calendar and taking it to corporate partners. The puzzle is finding an idea for every date that makes people feel like that particular night was made for them.
The most Rochester version of that strategy arrived in 2017. Minor league clubs share their best ideas with each other, something Dan says he loves about the industry. Teams in Lehigh Valley and Fresno had turned themselves into regional foods for select games. Rochester had the obvious answer.
The Red Wings became the Plates during the 100th anniversary of the garbage plate. The team announced the identity on July 4 and scheduled the first Plates Night for August 13. By July 5, every hat and shirt was gone. Rochester transplants and former students at RIT, the University of Rochester, and Geneseo started ordering merch from all over the country. Dan thought the idea would be popular. Nobody expected it to move that fast.
The same local instinct shapes the Lilac inspired jerseys, the Rochester Public Library Night, and other promotions that make people feel proud of where they are from. Dan says those are the ideas that strike the deepest chord. Rochester people like being from Rochester. The ballpark gives them a place to wear it openly.
The offbeat ideas go far beyond baseball. There have been Napoleon Dynamite nights, Batman nights, wrestling nights, and television themed promotions. The biggest autograph line in Red Wings history did not belong to a baseball Hall of Famer or an NFL legend. It belonged to Leslie David Baker, who played Stanley Hudson on The Office.
The line was so large that the club stopped taking autographs and switched to selfies. It still was not enough. Dan offered Baker another $2,000 to stay two more hours. Baker countered with $2,500. Dan laughs about the negotiation. Stanley drove a hard bargain, but he stayed, and the night worked.
The story is funny, but it also explains the point of the promotions. A fan who would not normally circle a Red Wings game on the calendar might come for Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite or a favorite wrestler. They come in for one reason, find a ballpark full of energy, and leave with a new reason to return.
Dan says you can come to 75 games and eat a different entree every night. It sounds like an exaggeration until he starts naming options: hot dogs, lobster, barbecue pulled pork nachos, fried dough, Mini Melts, and the full set of rotating special menus built around theme nights. On The Office Night, the food team leaned into Stanley themed pretzels and a tuna sub.
Chef Keith, food and beverage general manager Jeff DeSantis, and their team spend the off season reviewing what sold, what did not, and what the promotional schedule makes possible. Dan calls it Rochester's largest restaurant. His personal favorite is barbecue pulled pork nachos, though he admits a summer in the ballpark means a lot of hot dogs. His ideal white hot gets Rochester meat hot sauce.
The 2020 season was canceled completely. Dan says the loss forced the organization to become more nimble. The return in 2021 was strange, with restricted seating and a community still trying to figure out what safe togetherness looked like. In 2022, people got more comfortable. By 2023, he felt the crowd energy was back. Families wanted to be out with friends, churches, youth teams, schools, and neighbors again.
That matters because the team sees itself as a gathering place long after the final out. There are about 40 additional events at the ballpark each year. There are also 75 separate chances to make the place feel like it belongs to everybody.
Dan points to one family from Cleveland that travels to Rochester every year because of the allergy free berm. On that section of the ballpark, peanuts are not allowed. It is the only ballpark in the country where they feel safe attending a game. Dan says the moment gets right to the heart of the work. The club is in the memory making business. Its responsibility, he says, is to be more than just a baseball team.
That is why the club has made room for Pride Night, autism sensory accommodations, Deaf Culture Night, disability awareness programming, and other events that put different parts of Rochester in the foreground. Dan does not overcomplicate the response to critics. If somebody does not like a Grateful Dead Night, there are 74 other opportunities to come out. The invitation does not get smaller because a single promotion is not for everyone.
Dan calls himself a traditionalist, but he is a convert on the pitch clock. He watched games that regularly stretched past three hours shrink to about two and a half. A Yankees Red Sox game that once demanded four or five hours became a manageable evening. The dead time disappeared. Fans can still get the strategy and rhythm of baseball without watching a batter adjust batting gloves for the tenth time.
That same willingness to refresh is shaping the ballpark. The team is hopeful for new seats and other facility improvements in the next two or three years. Dan says the way people watched a game in 1997, when the current ballpark opened, is very different from how they watch one now. The menu, promotions, ticket options, suite experience, and physical structure all need attention every year. Change, he says, is the only constant.
Dan grew up as a Knothole Gang member at Silver Stadium. He remembers walking up the ramp, seeing grass greener than anything else in Rochester, smelling hot dogs, hearing vendors yell, and catching the crack of a bat in the middle of the city. He was part of the staff that closed Silver Stadium after 68 years in 1996 and opened the new ballpark the following season. He calls both nights two of the highlights of his life.
He still pulls into the parking lot at Innovative Field and catches himself thinking, this is where I work. The younger staff members now have their own first game stories at the current ballpark. Dan and the veterans feed off their energy. They see themselves as caretakers, keeping a hometown institution moving for the next group of kids who will remember a mascot, a foul ball, a first plate, or a night of fireworks long after they forget the score.
Dan builds his perfect garbage plate with a white hot and a red hot. For an out of town visitor, he serves the same two Rochester classics: a plate and a white hot. You know you are from Rochester, he says, when one of your parents worked for Kodak or Xerox.
His best Red Wings memories are a tie. Closing Silver Stadium and opening the new ballpark. One night honored 68 years of community history. The other began a new chapter. The Rochester thing he hopes never goes away is the festival culture, especially the Jazz Festival and Lilac Festival. When he is not at the ballpark, he is listening to live music. Rochester, he says, is Festival Town USA. He would like to keep it that way.
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