The Braves and Reds finally got back to baseball at the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, even if it took them until Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! The game was originally scheduled for Saturday, but it began to rain late in the afternoon. After a long delay and an aborted start, the “Speedway Classic” resumed at 1 p.m. today, and ended with a 4-2 Atlanta victory.
A record crowd was expected. There was pregame pomp and circumstance featuring both Pitbull and Tim McGraw. Then the weather kicked in. The game was delayed for 2 hours and 17 minutes while it rained. When it resumed, the teams recorded four total outs before the game was pushed.
Obviously MLB wanted to get the marquee event played, but it was a bad decision to have everybody warm up, get ready to play, then stop a few batters later. I asked around out of curiosity: Per usual NASCAR policy, a race at Bristol wouldn’t have been run in that level of rain. Different sports, I know, but the rain wasn’t the only issue: Fans reported food shortages and “bunless hot dogs.”
Austin Hays’s RBI single was the last play of Saturday night, which meant the game was suspended with the Reds holding a 1-0 lead. For the resumed game, both teams’ starters became openers. Atlanta’s Hurston Waldrep (spiritually a NASCAR name) went 5.2 innings and gave up a run, but Brent Suter gave up a three-run homer to Eli White in the second inning that put Atlanta ahead for good. On the Fox Sports broadcast, Ken Rosenthal reported that Reds pitcher Lyon Richardson, called up from the minors due to the game’s suspension, got to Tennessee via Rob Manfred’s private plane.
Baseball has been holding gimmick games—in Hawaii, in Japan, in London—for a while now. But in contrast to games simply held at neutral stadiums, a true gimmick game puts a two teams at a neutral site that usually doesn’t host big-league baseball. It started in 2016 with the Fort Bragg Game in North Carolina; only military personnel and their families were permitted to attend. MLB has also made a habit of holding one game per season at a stadium in Williamsport, Penn., during the Little League World Series. These games are usually intimate affairs: TV spectacles with a smaller crowd at the game. Only the Fort Bragg game (12,582) and a 2019 game in Omaha (25,454) drew more than 10,000 fans. But the league went for a big crowd with the Speedway, which has a maximum capacity of 146,000 for car races. MLB sold 85,000 tickets for the game, and the reported attendance was 91,032, even if not every fan could get there for the makeup date.
I love this kind of gimmick, especially for baseball. This is a sport where no two diamonds are the same. Outfield walls have quirks due to necessity or design. Why not hold games in hastily constructed temporary ballparks to mix things up even more? This one had a lot of cute accoutrements, too. Both teams wore custom NASCAR-style Gotham Italic-esque numbers and batting helmets that looked like little cars covered in ads. The Reds had a checkered-flag pattern on the bills of their hats. They sent a car around the track after a homer. Great stuff!
Even if a lot of the novelty is lost by watching the broadcast—it looked like a regular game most of the time—it’s still a pretty good idea, despite the logistical issues. We need more of these! MLB can’t control the weather, but for the next stunt game, someone has to make sure there are enough hot dog buns.
