A 110-foot Ferris wheel. Race cars painted in MLB team colors. Food trucks. Live music. Pitching tunnels and batting cages. A chance for photos with the Commissioner’s Trophy. And Clydesdales.
Of course, there’s merchandise available for any fans who forgot to grab their gear supporting the Atlanta Braves or Cincinnati Reds or simply commemorating a spectacle unlike any other.
“My sister’s already texted me asking for a t shirt,” said Marcia Lorenzo, 39, from Charleston, South Carolina.
After about four years in the planning, it’s finally time for the MLB Speedway Classic (7:15 p.m. ET on FOX and the FOX Sports app) to play ball Saturday night on the diamond constructed on the infield at Bristol Motor Speedway at the place called the “Last Great Colisseum!”
“When you walk up to Bristol Motor Speedway, much like many of our venues, you know you’re at a big iconic sports location,” said Jeremiah Yolkut, MLB’s senior vice president of global events. “You feel it. You walk into Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, you feel it. And that’s what Bristol Motor Speedway is for NASCAR.”
The MLB Speedway Classic was first announced nearly a year ago as part of Commissioner Rob Manfred’s push to take MLB to places where baseball isn’t played every day live. MLB played a game at the movie site in Iowa in both 2021 and 2022. Alabama, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, too.
Now it’s time for Tennessee, which has teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLS but no MLB team even as a group chases an expansion franchise for Nashville. This game mixes the rich racing history of both Bristol, which hosts a pair of NASCAR races each year, and Tennessee.
“So we quickly worked to make it so that we could viably create this magic moment and give fans that don’t get regular season baseball all the time, an opportunity to see it right there in their backyard in Tennessee,” Yolkut said.
The Reds, chasing an NL wild-card berth, split the first two games in this series with Atlanta. The rubber match will be a part of history as the first Major League Baseball game played in the state of Tennessee.
They will play before the largest crowd ever to see an MLB regular-season game, too.
Reds outfielder Austin Hays said this will be a fun game and can’t wait to see how loud it gets.
“I used to go to the truck races and the [Daytona] 500, the Rolex. I went to highschool close to Daytona,” Hays mentioned Friday after the Reds’ 3-2 win over Atlanta. “It’s the solely monitor I’ve ever been to. It’s a reasonably large monitor. I think about it’s going to be comparable standing on the infield, however it will likely be a baseball area this time.”
MLB did not attempt to promote each ticket contained in the speedway that drew 156,990 for the Battle of Bristol school soccer recreation in 2016. The monitor with a racing capability of 146,000 may host 90,000 or extra even with sections blocked off.
Officers introduced Monday greater than 85,000 tickets had been bought — topping the earlier paid attendance of 84,587 set Sept. 12, 1954, when Cleveland Stadium hosted the New York Yankees.
Sean Casey, a three-time All-Star now on the MLB Community, sees this as two tremendous powers coming collectively in an ideal partnership. NASCAR and baseball already cross over within the Atlanta and Cincinnati markets, and this crossover exposes followers to the opposite sport.
“It is such a singular state of affairs,” Casey mentioned Friday after broadcasting from the sector with MLB Community. “Kudos to (Commissioner) Rob Manfred of Main League Baseball and likewise NASCAR and Bristol Motor Speedway for placing this occasion collectively as a result of it may be one among a sort.”
As soon as the time comes for followers to maneuver inside Bristol, the schedule contains a pre-game live performance with Jake Owen becoming a member of stars Tim McGraw and Pitbull. A flyover by Navy jets, and a pair of Corridor of Famers in Atlanta’s Chipper Jones and Johnny Bench of the Reds will deal with the ceremonial first pitch.
Hunter Greear from Charleston, South Carolina, purchased tickets with three pals a yr in the past. They arrived on Thursday, tenting out and having fun with the weekend. Greear mentioned they actually did not know what to anticipate from MLB placing a baseball area within the infield of a racetrack.
“We had an concept,” Greear mentioned. “However all the things that’s been main as much as (the sport) actually has been making that concept even larger than we may presumably anticipate it to be.”
Reporting by The Related Press.
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