More fans who have ever seen a major league baseball game are ready to appear on Saturday to a field that did not exist 32 days ago, in a state that had never received a MLB game before.
Baseball itself will be the only familiar thing about Saturday’s confrontation at the Tennessee Speedway Motor Bristol between the Atlanta Braves and the Cincinnati reds, and that is on purpose.
MLB has organized games in unconventional places during the last decade. However, while a 2016 game at the Fort Bragg of North Carolina, the games in 2021 and 2022 in the same Iowa cornfield became famous for the movie “Field of Dreams” and the tribute of the black leagues last year at Rickwood Field Inter Birmingham, Alabam Better known for the value of the engines was designed as a kind of Sheer size.
More than 85,000 tickets for a confrontation called “Speedway Classic” have been sold, a number that will break the 84,587 league assistance record established in 1954 when the New York Yankees visited Cleveland.
“This really occupies a large place just because of the enormity of what we are building,” he told “Today,” he said “today,” said “Today.”
That construction project began on June 4, when Speedway began to demolish parts of its painting, including half of a building, to locate a baseball field between the third and fourth shifts of the half -mile track. Once that phase finished, he left a window of approximately 32 days to build the field and everything that surrounds it.
More than 18,000 tons of gravel were brought to create a leveling playing field, crowned by a pad that absorbs the crash that rests below the 124,000 square feet of artificial grass game surface. The lawn was filled with sand to provide a better rebound for a bathed ball. More than 300 tons of clay were required to build the bases and mounds. The existing lighting of Bristol Motor Speedway did not comply with the MLB standards for transmissions, which also required the temporary installation of 415 additional lighting accessories.
“Batery tunnels, waters, back network, batter eye, bullpens, missing posts; none of this is here, right?” Cook said. “So everything that has to be brought.”
Saturday’s game will mark the first MLB game in Tennessee for the same reason as the game last season in Birmingham was the first in Alabama, and why MLB has organized other games in recent years in Korea and the Olympic stadium in London. Planting live games in the markets that otherwise would not have major league baseball is “a huge pillar in terms of our growth strategy,” said MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred in April when Nashville visits.
“It is the commissioner’s office plan to grow the game worldwide and take it to places where, you know, you don’t have a major leagues,” Cook said.
When MLB visited London for series in 2023 and 2024, where a field was placed at the top of the local West Ham field of the Premier League, the assistance exceeded just 60,000. Bristol provided a much larger logistics challenge.
Bristol Motor Speedway is the second largest place in the country in the United States, as judged by the permanent seats, said Jerry Caldwell, Bristol Motor Speedway president and the place has used that capacity before to organize assistance figures imposed by records. A 2016 University Soccer match between Tennessee and Virginia Tech established the record of a single NCAA game.
The MLB challenge consisted of creating a baseball place within a Nascar installation that is approximately twice the size of a football field. The construction involved limitations. Although a four -sided video fogger named “Coloso” hangs 180 feet on the Speedway box, hung through cables that extend to the stadium’s corners, the stadium design sought to keep it off as much as possible. During the game, it will be in a foul territory, and the network settled to prevent the foul balls from damaging the screen.
“I love to see that this baseball field will rise in the middle of the racing track and is born almost,” Caldwell said.
Caldwell said he hopes that the memories of the game will last. But the transformation of the place will be brief. Cook expects the separation after the game will last about 15 days. Once eliminated, the entire field will be donated to the State University of East of Tennessee.
“We want it to be something they always remember, they will talk, they will have good memories of creating wonderful memories with their family, and I know that is what will happen,” Caldwell said. “And then we will eliminate all this, and six weeks later, we will do the same for the playoffs in Nascar.”
