BRISTOL, Tenn. — Bristol Motor Speedway, the home of multiple memorable moments for NASCAR over the past six-plus decades, is ready to make baseball history.
The stage, or in this case the race track, has been set for the biggest crowd ever for a Major League Baseball regular-season game at Saturday night’s MLB Speedway Classic between the Atlanta Braves and the Cincinnati Reds, a pair of National League clubs. Tennessee has never hosted a game between teams from the current major leagues — the NL and the American League — but the short track billed as “The Last Great Colosseum” is ready to provide the Volunteer State a first in that regard, too.
“The way the venue looks really is something that you can put on paper, but you really can’t get a true vision of it until you actually put grandstands on the infield of the track, and you put 3,500 seats in the middle of 87,000 seats,” Jeremiah Yolkut, MLB’s senior vice president of global events, said Friday. “Those things just don’t become a reality until you actually see them.”
What fans will see Saturday is a baseball diamond tucked inside the infield of the half-mile bullring at Bristol, which hosts two NASCAR weekends each year. A temporary grandstand wraps around both sidelines with a press box at the top, while the track’s Colossus videoboard hovers over foul territory along the third-base line. (Any balls hit off Colossus will be foul.)
Three-time MLB All-Star Sean Casey played in a March 2008 exhibition between the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers with 115,300 in attendance at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the largest crowd ever to see a baseball game. Casey, who played for the Reds from 1998 to 2005 in his 12-year MLB career, said Friday that the energy from the fans that day in L.A. was “incredible.”
“I think the Reds and the Braves taking this field with 90,000-plus people at Bristol Motor Speedway, the energy for this game is going to be off the charts,” Casey said after spending time on Bristol’s field broadcasting with MLB Network.
MLB didn’t try to top that 2008 mark for attendance, blocking off seats in the third and fourth turns at the track with a racing capacity of 146,000. Officials announced Monday that more than 85,000 tickets had been sold to top the previous MLB regular-season game paid attendance record of 84,587 set Sept. 12, 1954, when Cleveland Stadium hosted the New York Yankees visiting the Indians.
Yolkut said a difference between now and the 2008 game at the Los Angeles Coliseum is this is a regular-season game and not an exhibition. This game wasn’t about simply packing people in to set a record and telling some fans to just watch the game on the videoboard.
“We thought it was important to have as minimal obstruction seats as possible and to make sure that the fans coming were going to have a great experience,” Yolkut said.
Cincinnati entered Friday with a 57-53 record this season. That had the Reds third in the NL Central and eight games out of first place in the division standings, but they were 3 1/2 games out of the final wild-card spot in the league with two months remaining in the regular season.
Atlanta entered Friday 46-62, fourth in the NL East and 15 1/2 games out of first place, as well as 13 1/2 games out in the wild-card race. It’s been a disappointing year for the Braves — who haven’t missed the playoffs since the 2017 season — but at Bristol they’ll have a chance to secure their first series win since taking two of three games against the host St. Louis Cardinals on July 11-13.
That was just before the midseason break for the MLB All-Star Game, which was held at Atlanta’s Truist Park, and now the Braves will be part of another spotlight moment for the majors.
The MLB Speedway Classic will be a rubber match after Atlanta beat Cincinnati 12-11 in a 10-inning slugfest Thursday night before the Red held off the Braves for a 3-2 win Friday afternoon. Both of those games were at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park.
Friday’s matchup had a 12:40 p.m. first pitch and took just 2 hours and 16 minutes to complete, which gave plenty of lead time for teams and fans to make it to Tennessee for Saturday’s spectacle, which is set for 7:15 p.m. and will be televised by Fox. The teams have separate clubhouses, with the Reds behind the baseball field’s grandstand and the Braves just past the right field fence next to the track wall.
A few miles away, the Braves threw a watch party at the Bristol Paramount Theater for Friday’s game. Admission was free, with souvenirs available and the concession stand open with the big screen view.
To make sure fans arrive early Saturday, MLB also has a plan. The MLB Fan Zone just outside the speedway’s towering walls features a 110-foot Ferris wheel, food trucks, pitching tunnels and batting cages and team mascots. Tim McGraw and Pitbull will headline a big pregame concert inside the speedway.
A flyover is planned, and a pair of National Baseball Hall of Famers will handle the first pitch: Chipper Jones, who spent his entire MLB career in Atlanta from 1993-2012, will throw to Johnny Bench, a 14-time MLB All-Star who suited up only for the Reds while playing from 1967-83.
The chance to see history had fans arriving Thursday to take advantage of Bristol’s campgrounds. A group of Braves fans came from Charleston, South Carolina, and set up tents.
Rich Lorenzo, 40, has been watching the Braves since he grew up in Columbus, Georgia.
“I’m super excited because I’ve actually run Bristol in two different cars here, and it’s kind of cool to come for something other than racing,” Lorenzo said as he sat next to his tent. “So it’s a really, really amazing event to be a part of. Plus, the first Major League Baseball game in Tennessee.”
The game will have some extra home flavor from the scheduled starting pitchers, with right-handers Chase Burns (0-3, 6.26) of the Reds and Spencer Strider (5-8, 3.71) of the Braves both having grown up in the state.
The 124,000 square feet of AstroTurf will be donated after the game to East Tennessee State University as part of MLB ‘s Better Together social responsibility initiative. ETSU has had 45 players selected in the MLB draft over the years.
That program also held a STEM event in the infield Friday. About 60 members of the local Boys & Girls Club got to show the science and math behind hitting a baseball, running the bases or the quick reactions needed for MLB players and NASCAR drivers.
“We also get the opportunity to invest in the community that’s hosting us,” said April Brown, MLB’s senior vice president of social responsibility. “So this is incredibly important to our MLB Together pillars, because education and partnerships are key to what we want to invest in.”