More fans than have ever watched a Major League Baseball game are set to show up Saturday to a field that didn’t exist 32 days ago, in a state that has never previously hosted an MLB game.
The baseball itself will be the only thing familiar about Saturday’s matchup at Tennessee’s Bristol Motor Speedway between the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds — and that is on purpose.
MLB has staged games in unconventional places for the past decade. Yet while a 2016 game at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, games in 2021 and 2022 at the same Iowa cornfield made famous by the movie “Field of Dreams” and last year’s Negro Leagues tribute at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, were held in intimate settings, MLB’s visit to a venue better known for motorsports was designed as a spectacle of sheer size.
More than 85,000 tickets have been sold for a matchup dubbed the “Speedway Classic,” a number that will break the league’s attendance record of 84,587 set in 1954 when the New York Yankees visited Cleveland.
“This one really ranks up there big just because of the enormity of what we’re building,” Murray Cook, the president of Brightview Sports, who consults MLB on fields and ballparks, told “TODAY.”
That construction project began June 4, when the speedway started demolishing parts of its infield, including half of a building, in order to situate a baseball field between the half-mile track’s third and fourth turns. Once that phase ended, it left a window of about 32 days to build the field and everything surrounding it.
More than 18,000 tons of gravel were brought in to create a level playing field, topped by a shock-absorbing pad that rests underneath the 124,000 square feet of artificial turf playing surface. The turf was infilled with sand to provide a better bounce for a batted ball. More than 300 tons of clay were required to build the basepaths and mounds. Bristol Motor Speedway’s existing lighting did not meet MLB standards for broadcasts, which required the temporary installation of 415 extra lighting fixtures, as well.
“Batting tunnels, dugouts, backstop net, batter’s eye, bullpens, foul poles; none of this is here, right?” Cook said. “So all that has to be brought in.”
Saturday’s game will mark the first MLB game in Tennessee for the same reason last season’s game in Birmingham was its first in Alabama, and why MLB has staged other games in recent years in Korea and Olympic Stadium in London. Planting live games in markets that otherwise would not have big-league baseball is “a huge pillar in terms of our growth strategy,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in April when visiting Nashville.
“It’s the commissioner’s office plan to grow the game around the world and to take it to places where, you know, you don’t have a major league team,” Cook said.
When MLB visited London for series in 2023 and 2024, where a field was placed atop the home pitch of West Ham of the Premier League, attendance topped out just shy of 60,000. Bristol provided a much bigger logistical challenge.
Bristol Motor Speedway is the country’s second-largest venue in the U.S. as judged by permanent seating, said Jerry Caldwell, the Bristol Motor Speedway president, and the venue has used that capacity before to host record-smashing attendance figures. A 2016 college football game between Tennessee and Virginia Tech set the NCAA’s single-game record.
MLB’s challenge involved creating a baseball venue within a NASCAR facility that is approximately twice the size of a football field. The construction involved limitations. Though a four-sided videoboard called the “Colossus” hangs 180 feet over the speedway’s infield, strung up via cables that stretch to the stadium’s corners, the ballpark design sought to keep it out of play as much as possible. During the game, it will be in foul territory, and netting was installed to keep foul balls from damaging the screen.
“I love seeing this baseball field rise up out of the middle of the racetrack and kind of be born, almost,” Caldwell said.
Caldwell said he hopes the memories of the game endure. But the venue’s transformation will be brief. Cook expects the tear-down following the game to last about 15 days. Once removed, the entire field will be donated to Eastern Tennessee State University.
“We want it to be something that they’ll always remember, they’ll talk about, have fond memories of creating wonderful memories with their family, and I know that’s what will happen,” Caldwell said. “And then we’ll remove all this, and six weeks later, we’ll do the same thing for the playoffs in NASCAR.”
