What the San Diego Padres CIO does to deliver major league IT experiences

Petco Park consistently ranks among MLB’s top ballparks for fan experience. That doesn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t wait for a star-studded roster or a deep postseason run.

According to Padres CIO Ray Chan, the club made a deliberate choice more than a decade ago to run its tech organization as if every seat were full and the team was playing in October every year. The philosophy was simple — build a World Series-level digital foundation so when the on-field product caught up, the elite fan experience would already be there.

More than a ballpark

Most people know Petco Park as the home of the San Diego Padres, which it is, but the venue was designed to be more than that. In a typical year, it hosts 81 regular-season home games, plus potential postseason contests, and then adds concerts and private events in renovated premium spaces.

By Chan’s count, that totals to nearly 400 annual events, often with more than one on the property in a single day. Different parts of the venue may host different audiences simultaneously, with IT expected to turn spaces quickly and support the unique digital requirements of each event.

The multi-use model puts a premium on flexibility and speed. Spaces are designed to be reconfigured quickly, and the underlying technology stack must adapt just as quick.

An always‑on network

When Chan arrived 15 seasons ago, Petco Park looked very different from a connectivity standpoint. On sellout nights, fans often couldn’t place a call or send a text once they were inside the building. There was no real concept of a digital fan journey.

The first major shift came with deploying a full-venue managed distributed antenna system (DAS) from Verizon, and an Extreme Networks Wi-Fi solution, providing fans, staff, and baseball operations with reliable connectivity throughout the ballpark. That network has since become the converged backbone for almost everything that happens at Petco, including digital ticket entry via the MLB Ballpark app, security and operations, tech like instant replay and dugout tablets used by coaches and players, and in‑venue IPTV and signage, all riding on the same IP infrastructure.

For fans, the network is invisible. For Chan’s team, it’s non‑negotiable. “None of this stuff works without the infrastructure in place,” he says.

Consolidated convenience

The Padres have leaned heavily into the league-standard MLB Ballpark app, which provides a consistent digital experience across all 30 venues, while allowing clubs to customize the local section. At Petco specifically, that app becomes the fan’s control center for digital ticketing, ballpark navigation, and a built-in payments and discount wallets tied to offers like Padres Pay and contactless options.

The result is a highly digitized journey, and for many fans, their first and last interaction with the ballpark occurs on their mobile device, and that’s by design.

Toward frictionlessness

Chan and his team are already looking beyond digital barcodes to facial-authentication-based entry, leveraging MLB’s Go Ahead Entry program rolling out at several parks. In that model, fans enroll once in the app with a selfie, then simply walk through a designated lane while overhead cameras verify identity and automatically scan tickets.

The promise is a hands-free, eyes-up experience where fans no longer need to take out their phones at the gate. Chan says this is the most frictionless way to enter a ballpark, and it even enables personalized greetings by name at the turnstile, another small but memorable touch to create a World Series-caliber experience.

Concessions are another example of how Petco’s IT modernization seamlessly enhances the fan journey. Petco is now a fully cashless venue, so fans pay with credit cards, mobile wallets, or the dedicated Padres Pay capability integrated into the Ballpark app. This reduces transaction friction, speeds lines, and improves security by minimizing cash handling.

IPTV everywhere

The expanding IP television footprint is another hallmark of Petco’s fan experience strategy. New screens throughout the venue serve multiple roles to ensure game coverage is never lost, even when fans leave their seats.

They also show real-time updates and wayfinding, an L-bar format that combines live video with adjacent ad inventory and informational content, and full-screen takeovers during concerts or special events, letting the venue transform its look and feel to match what’s happening on the field or stage.

Because it’s all IP-based, game-day operations and marketing teams can reskin the park on the fly, turning screens into a flexible engagement and monetization channel rather than relying on fixed signage.

Constant modernization

Despite opening in 2004, Petco Park doesn’t feel like a 22-year-old venue. Chan says that’s intentional and points to a continuous program of infrastructure upgrades and capital projects to redo suites, unify premium spaces such as the Western Metal rooftop and loft, and find areas to transform into new experiences.

Beneath those visible changes lies ongoing modernization of the network and systems in terms of upgrading switches, faster Wi-Fi, and backend platforms to support the latest apps and services. As Chan puts it, the goal is to make the park look and feel no older than a couple of years, which requires consistent ownership commitment and alignment between IT and operations.

Perhaps the most important part of Chan’s playbook, however, is cultural rather than technical. He describes the Padres as a listening organization that actively solicits and incorporates fan feedback to refine the experience across seasons.

That mindset is shaping the club’s approach to AI, so instead of chasing it for its own sake, Chan is focused on use cases that improve customer service by using chatbots or AI-assisted voice lines to free staff for higher-value interactions, and solve specific operational problems such as using AI to match lost-and-found queries with a database of found items.

The bigger IT picture

The way Petco Park manages its technology operations offers patterns that can apply beyond sports venues, starting with establishing a converged, resilient backbone. Connectivity is a shared utility layer that everything else depends on, rather than a series of isolated projects. That makes it easier to add new capabilities later without rearchitecting every time.

Chan’s philosophy of building as if every seat were filled also applies across all e-commerce peaks, clinical surges, and manufacturing seasonality. Capacity planning, observability, and failover should be set at Black Friday, not an average Tuesday. And treat your environment as a multiuse and continuously modernizing platform. Petco’s “more than a ballpark” mindset reflects the shift toward mixed-use destinations or campuses that blend learning and events, and offices that evolve into collaboration hubs that chip away at legacy infrastructure. IT leaders across sectors can apply the same rolling-renovation model to networks, identity, observability, and edge infrastructure, keeping technical debt manageable.