MLB’s Long Road to Its Most Unusual Game Yet

For an event with the word “Speedway” right in the name, the run-up to Saturday’s MLB Speedway Classic was anything but fast. 

Rather, the development to stage the league’s first-ever game inside of a motorsports venue and first regular-season contest in the state of Tennessee took about three years to create, and it was marked by the many logistical hurdles of placing a regulation-grade baseball diamond inside of a racetrack. 

What MLB and Bristol Motor Speedway are set to gain for the game between the Reds and Braves, however, is the largest attendance for a regular-season game in league history, with more than 85,000 tickets already sold, an expected large viewership on Fox Sports, and the deep blending of two sports’ imagery and fandom into what is MLB’s most ambitious special-event contest ever.

“We’re really seeing now how this is becoming more than the sum of its parts, and it’s been amazing to move, finally, from renderings to reality,” MLB SVP of global events Jeremiah Yolkut tells Front Office Sports. 

Concept to Reality 

The biggest and most tangible element of the MLB Speedway Classic was the development of the field itself and related infrastructure, such as player locker rooms and trainers’ facilities, in the sprawling, 64-year-old racing stadium, known as The Last Great Colosseum. There’s an established methodology for that through MLB’s various special-event games in recent years,  and the league again employed a variety of outside firms such as commercial landscaper BrightView, sports architecture giant Populous, and event consultant BaAM Productions.

The MLB Speedway Classic, however, introduced additional factors such as regrading the infield area—normally part of the venue’s famed high-banked oval track—to meet baseball standards. Other efforts for the game included the removal of numerous pit walls, gas pumps, and interior lights and structures—as well as the installation of a turf field similar to Toronto’s Rogers Centre, instead of grass, as is typical at other special-event games. 

Further adding to the spectacle—and the complexity—of the event, MLB and Bristol Motor Speedway constructed two separate stages for a series of pregame concerts. One venue outside of the racetrack will feature performances by a series of musical artists, including Adam Doleac and Jake Owen, and highlight a fan festival that has been developed. Another larger stage has been built inside the venue and will house a pregame concert by country superstar Tim McGraw and hip-hop artist Pitbull. 

“It’s surreal to see, and it’s now game week,” Bristol Motor Speedway president Jerry Caldwell tells FOS. “People are going to be blown away by what they see. It looks like a baseball field. Yeah, it’s bigger [than a typical ballpark], and it’s spread out a little more, but it’s going to create great memories for a lot of people.”

Preaching to the Non-Converted

The MLB Speedway Classic extends a run of special-event league games in venues such as the Field of Dreams complex in Iowa, historic Rickwood Field in Alabama, the ongoing Little League Classic in Pennsylvania, and Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Many of those sites, however, are other baseball havens, and while special and unique in their own respects, simply leaned in to other facets of the sport’s history and fandom. 

Not so in Bristol. While still very much an MLB game, and one that counts in the standings, NASCAR theming is prevalent. From both teams’ uniforms to the inclusion of MLB-themed stock cars and plans for NASCAR-style player introductions and a victory-lane celebration for the winning team, the blending of racing and baseball fandom and iconography is a core feature of the MLB Speedway Classic.

“Racing is fundamental to all of this,” Yolkut says. “The flavor of NASCAR is really embedded into what we’re doing, and it’s a big part of why this is such a different type of event for us.”

Along similar lines, Caldwell said more than half of the ticket buyers for the MLB Speedway Classic are new to the racetrack’s database, giving another window into just how fertile the fan crossover already has been.

“This is a really wonderful part of the story,” he says. “You’ve got this historic venue in Bristol Motor Speedway, and we are a NASCAR track. That’s what we’ve been, but we’re also a major entertainment venue, and it’s a very natural fit to bring these fan bases together. It’s been a major part of the appeal of this from all sides.” 

As the game will be played in real life, the MLB Speedway Classic is already resonating in virtual terms as simulation video game MLB: The Show this week included Bristol Motor Speedway as a playable venue. 

“Anytime somebody wants to host a major event, whether it’s a sanctioning [sports] body or in entertainment, we absolutely want to be in that conversation,” Caldwell says. “This game continues to show that we can do that.”