Fasten your seat belts, baseball fans: The grand old game is headed to Bristol Motor Speedway.
Officials for Major League Baseball and Bristol Motor Speedway — the East Tennessee short track known as “The Last Great Colosseum” that holds more than 146,000 fans for NASCAR races — announced during a news conference Friday that the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds will play there in the Speedway Classic at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 2, 2025.
At the conference, an outline of where the baseball field will be next summer was laid out on Bristol’s infield, and also present were two replicas of the stock cars used in NASCAR competition: one with a Braves logo and the other with a Reds logo.
There were also ceremonial first pitches.
Former longtime Braves third baseman Chipper Jones, who helped the team win the 1995 World Series and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018, was joined by recently retired driver Kevin Harvick, a likely future NASCAR Hall of Famer who won the 2014 Cup Series championship and 60 races on that top-tier circuit during his career.