BRISTOL, Tenn. — Major League Baseball is heading to Thunder Valley.
Bristol Motor Speedway will host the “MLB Speedway Classic” on Aug. 2, 2025, a regular-season baseball game between the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds, MLB Vice President of Global Events Jeremiah Yolkut announced at the track Friday.
The milestone announcement marks a meshing of the baseball and racing worlds in its most unique fashion yet.
“I think it’s an amazing opportunity — and it’s already begun — to see NASCAR and MLB pull together,” Jerry Caldwell, president and general manager of Bristol Motor Speedway, said Friday. “I think this is a great platform for that. I think our fan bases fit naturally together, but I think we can do a lot of fun things to expose folks to both sides of that.”
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Representing the NASCAR contingent at the 0.533-mile bullring race track were drivers Chase Elliott, Ross Chastain and analyst Kevin Harvick, along with Speedway Motorsports president and CEO Marcus Smith, while Atlanta Braves legend Chipper Jones and Reds legend Eric Davis joined to represent their respective former teams. Elliott, the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion, is a longtime Braves fan hailing from Dawsonville, Georgia, with Jones a NASCAR fan dating back decades.
Friday, though, marked Jones’ first time inside the “Last Great Colosseum” before taking hot laps as a passenger in a stock car with Elliott. The mammoth stadium — albeit a short track by NASCAR’s standards — took Jones aback despite having attended multiple Daytona 500s as a Florida native just 20 miles inland from the “World Center of Racing.”
“I think if you had a camera on me, my mouth would have been wide open,” Jones said of his initial reaction to Bristol, imagining the tens of racing haulers packed into the center of the track. “I think seeing these stands full — being from the South and knowing what NASCAR means to everybody in the South, seeing all these butts in the seats and how loud it gets and just the bumping for four hours.
“Like I said, my pucker factor was a 9.5, and it was just me and him (Elliott) out there, you know? I mean, can you imagine 38, 39 other cars in such close proximity? All professional athletes stand in awe of professional athletes in other sports, and like no other, I stand in amazement at what these guys do.”
Yolkut has led numerous global projects in his time with MLB, including events at the historic Rickwood Field in Alabama and the MLB London Series at London Stadium in England. With a keen eye for big events, Yolkut sought a big venue that brought its own history. Enter Bristol.
“It all starts with an idea,” Yolkut said. “And for many years, a lot of folks within our organization and some of our partner organizations brought up the concept of playing at a large-scale sporting venue. And there’s not a lot of places that can host Major League Baseball. Our diamond obviously is unique — much different than some of the other sports. And so you really have to be strategic about what places you look at.
“But Bristol kept coming up as a possibility. And a few years ago, we came down here to take a look at it. And as Jerry mentioned in his commentary, you walk into the venue, and right away, you know you’re in a different kind of place, something incredibly special. Not only is it big on the outside, but the energy that’s on the inside, even when it’s empty, is different than any of the places that we’ve recently been, and that’s something you’re looking to make true.”
Yolkut said MLB will work with BaAM Productions, BrightView and Populous as it has in past builds to create the layout of the playing field and “allow us to bring these sites to life and figure out ways in which you can put a baseball diamond on an infield track with a giant scoreboard in the middle, and then bring in tens of thousands of fans to watch that and create that environment.”
“So, with those folks, as well as the folks here at Bristol, we have no doubt that we will be able to work through all the various things that will come up over the next year,” Yolkut said. “But for the most part, a good amount of the planning is done, and now it’s a matter of executing on that plan and building a diamond here in August of 2025.”
Murray Cook, leading BrightView’s field design and construction, acknowledged the challenges of fitting an MLB diamond with the confines of the Bristol footprint, noting a portion of the Goodyear building inside Turns 1 and 2 will need to be removed in addition to several pit walls. He added the build is expected to take 30 days, with an anticipated start on July 1, 2025.
“We’ve got a good design laid out as far as the actual dimensions of the park,” Cook said. “Got 330 (feet) down the lines and 400 to center. We got 375 to the right field alley, which is going to require part of the building out there to be removed, and we’re 384 (feet) to the left field alley. So we’ve got good dimensions all the way around, very respectable to any major-league park in the US.
“I think that, from a construction standpoint and planning, you know, again, there’s a lot of leveling needs to be done as you mentioned, and our goal there is to level that up with gravel like they typically would under the baseball fields and soccer fields that they use synthetic turf on. And obviously that’s also creating a large drainage issue with the actual infield pit area, so we’re putting a lot of drainage. So we’re in the engineering process to get that buttoned up. But again, we’re on a good path and got some good local partners here to work with.”
Elliott, NASCAR’s six-time defending Most Popular Driver, has long rooted for the Braves and was rewarded for it as a fan in 2021 as the Braves stormed to its first World Series title since 1995. In fact, Elliott even pulled his own version of double-duty as a driver-fan on Halloween that year, leading 289 laps at Martinsville Speedway, qualifying for the Championship 4 and then flying home to Dawsonville while the Braves played the Houston Astros in Game 5 with a 3-1 series advantage.
“I had some tickets, and I wasn’t sure whether or not I was gonna go,” Elliott recalled, “and I had decided coming home I was pretty tired, and I wasn’t gonna go. And I was driving to my house, and I was listening on radio, and (Adam Duvall) hit a four-run home run there early in the game. … And they would have won the series that night if they had won. And I was like, oh my gosh, they just hit this home run. I’m gonna have to go. So I took a right, went south, and I showed up down there, and they ended up blowing the game. But they got it back a couple nights later. It was pretty fun, though.”
The ties between baseball and racing run deep, and that has perhaps never been more true than Friday’s announcement. And while it’s a baseball game on deck at Bristol, Chastain sees beauty on both sides of the proverbial coin.
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“I think it’s unmeasurable what it could do for both sports,” Chastain said. “People coming here may have never even heard of Bristol, but they’re coming for the baseball game. And Bristol season-ticket holders might think, ‘You know what? I went to the football game. I went to the dirt sprint car races and the dirt races here and a bunch of NASCAR races. I want to go see a baseball game here.’ I think you’re gonna have quite a bit of cross-pollination with that.”
Indeed, the “World’s Fastest Half-Mile” housed the 2016 “Battle at Bristol,” a regular-season college football contest between the University of Tennessee and Virginia Tech, a game that drew an NCAA football record crowd of 156,990 people to the “Last Great Colosseum.”
The track additionally hosted an NCAA FCS football game between East Tennessee State and Western Carolina one week after the “Battle of Bristol,” while the National Football League played an exhibition football game at Bristol between Philadelphia and Washington in 1961.
What’s set to come in 2025, however, is something entirely new. The facility has never played host to professional baseball, and the state of Tennessee has never hosted an MLB game. Now, two franchises steeped in history are set to write a new chapter within the concrete oval next year.