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After an overnight red flag, so to speak, the MLB Speedway Classic finally got done Sunday afternoon at Bristol Motor Speedway, but without much of the initial pomp and circumstance.
Completing the rain-suspended game from Saturday night, the Braves beat the Reds by a 4–2 score in the high-profile event that marked MLB’s debut effort playing in a racetrack, and its first regular-season game in Tennessee.
The game hit an announced attendance total of 91,032, surpassing the expectations last week of the establishment of a new league record for a regular-season game. That figure, like any other MLB game, reflects tickets sold, but because of the weather delay, the actual turnout Sunday was considerably less.
Still, that figure is nearly 60% more than the largest crowd for the Dodgers, MLB’s perennial attendance leader, at Dodger Stadium.
Many of the pregame elements from Saturday, including a series of concerts led by country star Tim McGraw, were not repeated on Sunday. But there were many other continued nods to the event’s heavy interplay between baseball and auto racing, such as the home run car that circled the heavily embanked track after each of two homers hit by the Braves’ Eli White that paced Atlanta’s victory.
“It was a great experience,” White said about playing in the racetrack. “Even yesterday, it was disappointing with the rain, but all the pregame stuff, getting to ride around the track in front of all the fans was super cool, and will be something I’ll always remember.”
Sense of Awe
What was also very clear throughout the two days in Bristol was the feeling of massive scale at Bristol Motor Speedway, one of the largest sports venues in the world.
The vastness of the facility, which normally seats about 165,000 people, was scarcely lost on anyone there.
“We’ve been in the cornfields [at the Field of Dreams complex]. We’ve been to Little League. We’ve been around the world. They’re all special, but this one was certainly unique,” Murray Cook, MLB’s official field consultant and president of the sports turf division for BrightView, tells Front Office Sports, recounting other special-event games. “What’s been so interesting is watching everybody—players included—just taking it all in.”
Breaking It Down
The 34-day sprint to construct the temporary baseball field at the speedway involved nearly 18,000 tons of gravel, the removal of 1,000 feet of pit row walls, and a temporary repositioning of the venue’s “Colossus” jumbotron. The teardown, however, will be far quicker, with the dismantling slated to require about two weeks.
This won’t be the end of the field, though. MLB opted for turf instead of natural grass to enable a gift of the field to East Tennessee State University’s baseball program. The turf pieces—along with related infrastructure such as bullpens, the batter’s eye, and foul poles—will be shipped over to the Division I school in nearby Johnson City.
“It’s going to be a fantastic addition to Thomas Stadium. Having a game at BMS is going to be a wild experience,” East Tennessee coach Joe Pennucci said before the contest. “To have a small part in it is a cool opportunity for everyone involved.”
The uniqueness and scale of the MLB Speedway Classic, meanwhile, raise the bar substantially for future special-event games, even with the weather issues and some logistical problems in Bristol around elements such as food service. The league has not yet disclosed its future plans, and while the 2026 schedule is expected to be released later this month, MLB has given itself a particularly tough comparison.
Full viewership figures from the Fox Sports broadcast of the game, meanwhile, are anticipated early this week. The MLB Speedway Classic will be compared to last year’s game at historic Rickwood Field in Alabama, which averaged 2.35 million viewers, and two Field of Dreams games from Iowa, which averaged 3.1 million viewers in 2022, and 5.9 million viewers the year before—all of which were played at night.
The postponement and move to a daytime slot, however, is almost certain to cut noticeably into the final viewership figure.
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