Report: Braves, Reds to play game at NASCAR's Bristol Motor Speedway
Major League Baseball is coming to Tennessee in a very unique venue.
The Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds will play a regular-season game at famed NASCAR venue Bristol Motor Speedway next season, sources told Jordan Bianchi and Evan Drellich of The Athletic.
A date for the game hasn't been confirmed, though an official announcement at the speedway is expected Friday, according to Bianchi and Drellich. The Braves and Reds are scheduled to play each other twice next season - a four-game set in Atlanta from May 5-8 and a three-game series in Cincinnati from Aug. 1-3. NASCAR has yet to release its full 2025 race schedule.
The oval-shaped NASCAR track would be the latest interesting venue for MLB, which has hosted games at locations such as North Carolina military base Fort Bragg (now known as Fort Liberty), the "Field of Dreams" movie site in Iowa, and Birmingham's historic Rickwood Field over the past decade. MLB has also staged games in international cities such as London and Mexico City.
With a seating capacity of 146,000, the Bristol game could break MLB's attendance record by a wide margin. Only one baseball game on record - a 2008 exhibition contest between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum - had an attendance figure above 100,000. The record for a regular-season or playoff game was also set at the Coliseum when 92,706 fans attended Game 5 of the 1959 World Series.
MLB previously announced a pair of season-opening games between the Dodgers and Chicago Cubs in Tokyo next March.
Bristol Motor Speedway opened in 1961 and is considered one of NASCAR's most important and iconic venues. The race track generally hosts two Cup Series races each season: the Food City 500 in the spring and the Bass Pro Shops Night Race in early fall.
The track's location outside of Bristol is nearly equidistant between Atlanta and Cincinnati.
Tennessee has never hosted a regular-season MLB game, though a group of prospective owners are currently in active pursuit of a franchise for Nashville.