How Miamis Mark Light Shake became college baseballs most delicious treat

Publish date: 2024-04-29

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — Gage Ziehl, Miami’s Friday night starter, snuck a sip at a high school game once. It was Oreo-flavored.

Blake Cyr has never tasted one.

It’s against the rules. Hurricanes coach Gino DiMare doesn’t allow his players to partake.

“I heard they’re unbelievable,” said Cyr, Miami’s All-ACC second baseman. “I have friends who tell me they’re coming to the games, but I never end up seeing them. Then, after the game, they tell me, ‘Sorry, I only went for the milkshake.'”

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College baseball’s NCAA Tournament gets underway Friday with action across 16 sites, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a concession item sold on-site with a richer history than the Mark Light Shake.

“They’re absolutely fantastic,” said Georgia Tech radio play-by-play voice Colin Lacy, who had his first experience with the Mark Light Shake when the Hurricanes took two of three from the Yellow Jackets in late April.

“I had way more shakes than I needed to. I ended up drinking four that weekend because we had a long rain delay on Saturday. I had the Sugarcane (vanilla with cookie dough), two chocolates and the Jayro (chocolate with Oreos and fudge). That last one was pretty out of this world.”

The shakes have been around since 1986 and have come in more than 40 different flavors — not including the infamous ones created in honor of opponents.

Mitch Freedman, who has run the stand for 38 years, created a specialty shake for each visiting team this weekend. He’s serving a vanilla shake with barbecued beef brisket in honor of the Texas Longhorns, a vanilla shake with Tabasco sauce for the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns and a vanilla shake with butter and lobster for the Maine Black Bears.

There are 34 shakes on the 2023 menu… There are 34 home games in 2023… Coincidence? @MiamiHurricanes @univmiami @CanesBaseball @NCAABaseball @NCAAStats @theACC @ACCBaseball pic.twitter.com/fMa5wY8hve

— Mark Light Shake (@MarkLightShake) February 2, 2023

“If I had the time, I’d make the brisket on my own. But I don’t,” said Freedman, who will get a local BBQ restaurant to provide the meat and a seafood restaurant to provide the lobster. “The brisket could sell, I don’t know. Years ago, we had a chocolate bacon shake. This will be somewhat similar. That did well.”

Last year, in honor of Canisius, which played in the Miami Regional and is located in Buffalo, N.Y., Freedman created a vanilla shake with buffalo wings and sauce in it.

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Ole Miss, which went on to win last year’s Coral Gables Regional and the national title, had the Hotty Toddy created in its honor. The shake turned out to be very popular — vanilla topped with cinnamon and bourbon.

“The Mark Light Shake is something that I’d always heard of just being a college baseball fan, and I finally got to experience it last year,” said Duke sports information director Aaron Socha, who had a shake for the first time last year when he was still working at UCF and during the Blue Devils’ recent three-game series in South Florida.

“It blew me out of the water. Before we came down a couple weeks ago, I was planning out what I was going to have each day. One of these years when I’m out of the business, I’m going to go down there for the specialty shakes during Regional week. I have to.”

Mark Light Field is the only place you can get Freedman’s shakes. Professional athletes and movie stars — such as Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez — have been regular customers in the past. So, too, has rapper Luther Campbell, Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel, NFL Hall of Famer Ted Hendricks and former NBA coach Stan Van Gundy.

Freedman claims no current players have tried to buy one since DiMare took over as coach. That doesn’t mean they aren’t curious.

“I’ve heard a lot about them,” All-American closer Andrew Walters said. “I’ve never experienced a Mark Light Shake. I’ve always wanted to go up there and get a strawberry shake. It’s been three years and I still haven’t had a shake. My sisters have had them. It’s not the greatest thing to do on a Sunday in the hot sun, but a Friday or Saturday night? Mmm.”

DiMare isn’t trying to be a curmudgeon — he simply wants to keep his players in the best shape possible.

“Back in the day, nutrition for players wasn’t like it is now,” said DiMare, who played for Ron Fraser (1989-92) and was a longtime UM assistant who took over the program from Jim Morris in 2019.

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“We used to eat concession food before the game. It was crazy. My first year, I did put a stop to it. I had to break the bad news to the concession guys. But we put a lot of money into our kids eating right.”

Has DiMare, 53, stayed true to his rules and avoided drinking a shake? Not exactly.

“I came to a high school game and had one earlier this year,” he admitted. “But it was within the rules since it wasn’t during one of our games. I know my Dad (longtime Miami booster Paul DiMare, who passed away earlier this year) used to have them, and strawberry was his favorite. My mom wasn’t happy about it.

“Me, I’m a regular straight-up strawberry shake guy myself.”

Fraser used to give Freedman a sign when he was ready for his favorite postgame shake.

“He would pop out of the dugout — like a third-base coach routine with the hand signals. It meant he wanted chocolate ice cream with hot fudge,” said Freedman, 73, who grew up in Boston and raised his sons, Andy and Michael, in South Florida. “Then, the doctors told coach Fraser to stop eating so much chocolate. So he’d pop out of the dugout, make a small hand movement like he had a ladle in his hands. So, I’d give him vanilla with a small ladle of hot chocolate poured over the top. He had one of those on most nights.”

Freedman started selling ice cream at Mark Light — under a tent behind Miami’s dugout — after he received a phone call from two former UM students who started running the concession stands not long after the Hurricanes won their second national title under Fraser in 1985. Freedman said he didn’t sell shakes his first year and didn’t begin mass producing them until the proper refrigeration units became available later.

“Back then, McDonald’s didn’t sell soft serve ice cream as they do now, and getting soft serve anywhere other than a Dairy Queen or Carvel was a big treat,” Freedman said. “Most people, though, only wanted ice cream after they got to the stadium and ate hot dogs and hamburgers. So, we wanted to come up with something people could have with their meal or earlier — so we could have business throughout the whole game. That’s how we came up with the shakes.”

Mitch Freedman with three of his seven grandchildren at a Miami Hurricanes baseball game.

There were four original flavors: vanilla, chocolate, coffee and mocha. The first shake with a name was the Nestor Special — branded in honor of former security guard Nestor Leon, who liked his mocha shake with hot fudge. He’s since named other shakes after Fraser (The Wizard), who passed away in 2013 at age 79, Morris, the two-time College World Series winning coach at Miami, and longtime in-stadium announcer Jay Rokeach.

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Freedman created a few shakes in honor of the football team — including the Turnover Chain and 8 Laterals — but took them off the menu after a conversation with coach Mario Cristobal this past year. He said he’s down to roughly two dozen shakes on the menu so he can make them faster.

Why hasn’t the Mark Light Shake found its way to Hard Rock Stadium or other pro venues in South Florida?

“Some of it is time — there’s a lot of it between innings and not so much at the half,” Freedman said. “Also, the university owns the concessions at Mark Light. They can deal with us directly. At the other stadiums, there are national companies that have the concession contracts, and they’re very, very unreasonable. We had talks with Joe Robbie Stadium, Marlins Park and then basketball here, but it just never came to fruition.

“Now, I’m too old to worry about it.”

On Tuesday, Freedman was at Mark Light Field, sanitizing the equipment he’ll be using this weekend as Miami hosts its 28th NCAA Regional since 1977. He said it takes him an hour to clean, assemble and lubricate each of his three shake mixers, which cost him and the school $18,000 a piece.

He fills three commercial refrigerators — at 18 to 20 degrees — with 70 to 80 gallons of manufactured ice cream (80 percent of it is vanilla) before each game. He said he makes between 400 to 500 shakes per game, and they sell for $11 each. It takes about a minute each to crank them out.

Freedman has been honored by the Hurricanes for his work over the years. He’s thrown out the first pitch at a game. He calls himself a small cog in the business at Mark Light but takes great pride in his role. He’s also proud of his sons, who are both sports TV executives and run the social media accounts for the Mark Light Shake.

“People have asked me, ‘Do you make any money doing this?'” Freedman said. “I tell them, I’m still trying.”

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He plays a role, though, in naming the shakes, of course, and he gets recognized when he pops into other local businesses that support the Hurricanes.

“I live my life one-tenth of knowing what it’s like to be a celebrity,” Freedman said. “People ask me, ‘Why are you still doing it?’ I discovered the answer. When I see the expression on a person’s face who’s never had a shake and was taking that first sip, that’s why I do it.”

(Photos courtesy of Mitch Freedman)

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