The most universally loved person at Citizens Bank Park isn’t Bryce Harper or Rob Thomson.
It’s actually, Frank Mazzuca.
You may know him better by his stage name “Frankie Two Scoops.”
Mazzuca, 80, started working with the Phillies in April of 1999. This came after he had worked 40 years as a salesman for a bank, covering the territory from Maine to Boca Raton, with Michigan, Louisiana and Texas mixed in.
He accepted a retirement package after 40 years with the bank, but quickly found that he wasn’t meant to stay home.
“[I] stayed home for about three weeks, and I went nuts,” Mazzuca recalled. “I mean, how much Jerry Springer can I watch?”
Looking for what was next in life, Mazzuca attended a Phillies game at Veterans Stadium with his son, his brother and his nephew. He noticed some employees with badges, but multiple different shirt colors. He called one over and asked what the different shirt colors meant.
“He said, ‘Well, the blue shirts are for security, the yellow shirts are the grounds crew and the white shirts were like host and hostesses.'”
Mazzuca would put on the white shirt for his first two years as a stadium employee for the Phillies, beginning in 1999. After that, he served in a variety of roles in the cafeteria at Veterans Stadium — and eventually, Citizens Bank Park — such as cook, server and cashier.
But Mazzuca’s claim to fame has been working as the ice cream scooper in the cafeteria, which serves team employees and media members. It’s catapulted him into folk hero status inside the stadium and allowed him to become friends with some of his sports heroes.
Who’s The Coolest Person You’ve Gotten To Serve Ice Cream To?
Before you can finish asking Mazzuca this question, he simply says “Schmitty,” of course referring to Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt.
The greatest player in franchise history has appeared on weekend telecasts since the 2014 season, and in that time, he’s gotten way more than two scoops of ice cream from the Phillies’ cafeteria.
“Mike used to come in, get his coffee and go right back to the booth,” Mazzuca said. “So at the end of his first year, I had enough guts to walk up to him and say, ‘Mike, don’t you like ice cream? Don’t you like food?’ He says, ‘I don’t know where it is.’ I said ‘It’s right back here.’ So that was the first year.”
It doesn’t matter who you are, if you walk into the cafeteria, there’s a good chance that Mazzuca will strike up a conversation with you. Once Schmidt realized that Mazzuca wasn’t looking to get anything from him or spend every second of their conversations talking about baseball, he took a liking to Mr. Scoops.
“I said, “Mike, how’s the family, how’s Donna [Schmidt’s wife], how’s the kids? He said, ‘How do you know about Donna? How do you know about the kids?’ I said, ‘I remember when you hit No. 500 in Pittsburgh, Donna was in the audience and the kids were small. They were going crazy’.
“He said, ‘You know, this is very, very nice to talk to somebody about things other than baseball.’ So that’s where I think I created this friendship.”
At the end of the second year, the friendship was in full bloom, but Mazzuca was resigned to the fact that he wouldn’t talk to Schmidt until the following season, telling him to have a good one because he wouldn’t see him until next spring.
“He said, ‘I answer all my mail.'”
“I said, ‘I don’t know where you live.'”
“So he gives me his address, email, cell phone and this and that, which was really great,” Mazzuca remembered.
Not only does Mazzuca now send Schmidt a Christmas card every year, but the three-time National League MVP reciprocates by sending one back.
Over the years, Mazzuca has built relationships with Larry Bowa, Chip Caray, Bob Uecker and John Smoltz.
He also passed along a hilarious story of an interaction he had while serving the New York Mets’ broadcast team of Gary Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez during the 2022 season.
“I said, ‘Ron, you remind me of a president of an organization.’
“I said to Cohen, ‘you remind me of the CEO of the same corporation’ and I left it.”
Naturally, the trio then asked Mazzuca who Hernandez — who would became public enemy No. 1 for Phillies fans later in the season — reminded him of.
“I said, ‘You remind me of Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island.'”
And The 2022 Rookie Of The Year Is…
When the Phillies retired the late Dick Allen’s No. 15 in September of 2020, Tom McCarthy introduced Schmidt, who delivered a moving speech in front of Allen, just months before the former National League Rookie of the Year would pass away.
But before he dove into a speech talking about the trials and tribulations that Allen faced in his career as one of the game’s first Black stars, he mentioned to McCarthy that he looked forward to getting back into the booth with him and having a sense of normalcy, even name dropping “Frankie Two Scoops,” saying he couldn’t wait to be served ice cream by him again.
During the 2020 season, there were limits on how many media members and team employees could be in the press box as the sport tried to continue on in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. While occasional snacks were offered, if you wanted to eat during the 30 home games in 2020, you needed to bring your own food with you to the press box. There weren’t the grand meals that the Phillies’ staff — viewed around the league as offering one of the best mixes of food to media members — typically prepares before each game. There certainly wasn’t ice cream.
But prepared meals returned beginning in 2021, with the full cafeteria reopening early in the summer as the COVID-19 vaccine became more widely available and infection rates began to dip.
And, of course, “Frankie Two Scoops” returned.
Each year, Mazzuca awards his “Rookie of the Year,” the most popular new flavor of ice cream in the cafeteria. 2020 didn’t have a Rookie of the Year, but there wouldn’t have been the full sample size of 81 home games to properly determine which flavor was deserving. In 2021, the Rookie of the Year was vanilla peanut butter. In 2022, it’s been cinnamon bun.
Perhaps Mazzuca — who has joked that he’s headed for offseason Tommy John surgery — will get to serve cinnamon bun ice cream to team employees and media members before World Series victory speeches are given at Citizens Bank Park next week.
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