NEW YORK — Anticipation is beginning to build around MLB’s Speedway Classic.
For Braves fans, that means another day closer to watching their favorite team play in a unique location, a race track.
One former Braves All-Star expects the club to have a lot of fans in attendance on Aug. 2 when it participates in the inaugural game, which will pit the Braves against the Reds at Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee.
“You can call it Braves Country,” Andruw Jones said Wednesday during a meeting at the MLB office in New York. “It’s gonna be a lot of fans out there rooting for the Braves.”
Jones, a five-time All-Star and 10-time Gold Glove winner for the Braves, credited the team’s widespread fan base to TBS broadcasting its games to a national audience in the late 1970s. Over time, baseball fans began to fall in love with the club since its matchups were some of few consistently available to view on television.
Plus, the MLB Speedway Classic will take place in Bristol, which is just over a five-hour drive from Truist Park in east Tennessee near the Virginia state line.
“We were one of those teams that’s always on TV all the time,” Jones said. “That did a great job to put on regular channels, so everybody can watch us … So it’s good to be part of it. You know those fans are going to show up.”
The game will mark MLB’s first time playing a regular-season game in the state of Tennessee. The St. Louis Cardinals have frequently played exhibition games in Memphis, home of their Triple-A franchise. The Texas Rangers played a 2019 exhibition game in Nashville, then their Triple-A affiliate.
Jerry Caldwell, president of Bristol Motor Speedway, said the Braves’ and Reds’ close proximity to the track — each club is around 300 miles — was the primary reason for their participation.
“If you’re playing in the Southeast, you’re going to have Braves involved,” Caldwell said. “You want the Braves involved.”
And those associated with the event expect the Braves to bring a large fan base with them.
The Bristol Motor Speedway is owned by Speedway Motorsports, which also operates EchoPark Speedway outside Atlanta. The Bristol track hosts two NASCAR Cup series races each season. The first in 2025 was April 13. The second will be during the Cup playoffs Sept. 13.
The venue has been used once for college football. The “Battle At Bristol” in 2016 featured Tennessee and Virginia Tech. Tennessee won, 45-24, before a single-game college football record crowd of 156,990.
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