Baseball Commissioner Anxious to See Crowd Size For Braves-Reds Game at Bristol Speedway

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Major League Baseball has played at the “Field of Dreams” movie site. Now baseball is eager to see just how big a crowd will show up for a game at a NASCAR bullring of a track.

And Bristol Motor Speedway can hold a lot of people.

It’s part of Commissioner Rob Manfred’s push to take MLB to locations 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 Tennessee’s turn.

Manfred noted Tuesday after speaking at the CAA World Congress of Sports Presented by Sports Business Journal that the Tennessee Volunteers are the defending college baseball national champions with Vanderbilt winner of two college titles. Manfred sees lots of alignment between NASCAR and MLB fans.

“Big crowd, big crowd,” Manfred said of what is expected at Bristol on Aug. 2. “We think that it’s an opportunity to have a really large audience for a major league game, and we think the setting in really a legendary speedway is going to be awesome for a baseball game.”

Nobody is ready to put a number on how many will turn out for the MLB Speedway Classic when the Cincinnati Reds host the Atlanta Braves. Bristol set a record for a college football game in 2016 and has a capacity of 146,000 for racing.

Categories: Sports – ATL Braves, Sports – Local Sports News