NASCAR has held races in some interesting places…on the beach, on dirt tracks, and on a football field. Next year, they will add a military base and airplane tarmac to the list.
Major League Baseball is following the example and on Saturday night will hold a game between the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds at Bristol Motor Speedway!
Thunder Valley will roar with the crack of wooden bats and balls hitting gloves instead of engines.
Billed the Speedway Classic, it will be the first professional baseball game ever played in the state of Tennessee.
President of Bristol Jerry Caldwell said, “we love hosting the races that we host, but it’s always fun to showcase our facility in a different light, and we’ve done that with football, and now we’re thrilled to be able to do that with Major League Baseball. They’ve been great to work with. We’re blessed with a world-class team within Speedway Motorsports and at Bristol Motor Speedway. And then you couple that team with the team that Major League Baseball has assembled, and it’s really putting together something special, and I can’t wait for folks to get here and see it and just be wowed.”
MLB senior vice president of global events Jeremiah Yokut spoke on Bristol saying, “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. Those things just don’t become a reality until you actually see them.”
“The Last Coliseum” and the “World’s Fastest Half-Mile” has host more than just auto races; in 1961 it was an NFL exhibition game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the then Washington Redskins and in 2016 the University of Tennessee and Virginia Tech football teams squared off before over 150,000 fans to set an NCAA football record.
A packed Bristol Motor Speedway is filled with some 150,000 people; on Saturday night, MLB is looking at setting a new record when over 85,000 people are expected to attend the game.
Bristol is a half mile track – one of the smallest tracks on the NASCAR circuit -; in order to fit a baseball diamond in the infield, major changes were needed. After the spring race at Bristol, construction for the baseball field began with some demolition of walls and buildings. Over 400 workers were required to construct the field for the Speedway Classic.
When NASCAR turned Bristol into a dirt track, hundreds of tons of dirt, clay, and shells to construct the track; for the MLB to build the baseball diamond 340 tons of infield clay, 450 wall pads, 17,500 tons of rock, 80,000 square feet of backstop netting, and 124,000 square feet of Diamond Series AstroTurf were needed to construct a field reaching 330 feet down the foul lines and 400 feet out to dead center field. The turf will be donated to East Tennessee State University after the game.
Jerry Caldwell spoke on the project saying, “it’s kind of dreaming up this concept and saying, what if. Then we get computer renderings of what it could look like, and then now we’re showing pictures of what it really is like, and you’re seeing all that stuff come together. It’s a great sense of accomplishment and fun for me to see and for our team just because our teams work so hard on it, getting everyone to see this kind of work of art, almost, that they’ve created.”
The players are even getting in on the spirit of the game with “Talladega Nights” inspired catching gear and racing themed uniforms.
NASCAR is on the short track at Iowa this weekend, but they have some thoughts on the race. Chase Briscoe said, “a lot of baseball fans are going to go to Bristol and be like, man, this is wild. I can’t imagine they race on the banking and stuff like this. And hopefully, they come back for a race. And even for the players, I know that I was able to do some stuff with the Reds. And even Elly De La Cruz (Reds’ shortstop), right? He was racing around the track, and he was so intrigued by it. So hopefully, we can get some more of those guys to the race track. I think the more we can do that kind of stuff just helps you know push all this in the right direction.”
Michael McDowell added, “any time you can introduce yourself and expose yourself to new fans and create new opportunities, great, and I think we’ve done a good job of doing that with a lot of different opportunities, whether (Clash at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum), whether it’s street races, whether it’s going to cities, going to different places, engaging in other sports and engaging with other athletes. I feel like that’s a big part of just overall growing our brand as a NASCAR brand.”
And in September, NASCAR will return to Bristol for the Night Race; Caldwell noted that some 300 people from MLB and Bristol will dismantle the baseball field and prepare the track for the race one the game is over. He said, “we’ve got to make sure we’re keeping our eye on the ball, and we can do that. There are lots of major facilities that host huge events weeks apart, and we’re going to be able to do that, but it takes a tremendous amount of planning, a tremendous amount of cooperation, and that’s what we’ve done. … From the partners with Major League Baseball, understanding that we have to get ready for the race, and then partners that we’re going to bring in that are from the construction space that will help us execute as we head towards the playoff race, and we’ll be ready, but it’s really just a tremendous amount of planning and making sure we’re all on the same page.”
Outside the track, MLB has set up a Fan Zone with a 110-foot Ferris wheel, food trucks, pitching and hitting facilities, and mascots! Tim McGraw and Pitbull are giving a pre-game concert inside.
MLB legends Chipper Jones and Johnny Bench will handle the ceremonial first pitch duties.
Race tracks are known for large camping areas where fans, drivers, and crews park their motor homes; baseball fans are taking advantage of the campgrounds at Bristol and have already started arriving for the festivities.