It’s now official: MLB going to a famed motorsports venue to play a baseball game is big business.
The league said Monday that it has sold more than 85,000 tickets for the MLB Speedway Classic on Aug. 2 at Bristol Motor Speedway involving the Reds and Braves. That figure surpasses a regular-season record of 84,587 set in 1954 in Cleveland between that team and the Yankees.
An even larger crowd of 115,300 attended an exhibition game in 2008 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The unique layout of Bristol Motor Speedway relative to a baseball diamond, however, and the league’s desire to maintain optimal viewing angles for fans, will prevent that larger figure from being reached.
Instead, MLB expects to max out at slightly under 90,000 for the game. By any measure, though, this will remain a historic event, and it is also the most ambitious special-event game in MLB history.
“Breaking this record makes this an even bigger event than it already was and was first contemplated, and helps ensure this won’t be remembered in 2025, but hopefully a lot longer than that,” MLB SVP of global events Jeremiah Yolkut tells Front Office Sports.
In the works for more than a year, the MLB Speedway Classic had already been targeted as the largest single-game attendance of the season. The game will also be MLB’s first in the regular season held in Tennessee.
Ticket buyers have come from all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Washington, D.C., and nine other countries on four continents.
