Why baseball’s biggest game in 70 years is happening at a racetrack

Major League Baseball is getting creative to bring new fans into the game. 

The league’s experimentation will result in a lot of firsts this weekend, with a special game hosted at an iconic NASCAR track in Tennessee. The event, dubbed the MLB Speedway Classic, will mark the first MLB game ever played in the state and it’s already smashed a league attendance record, topping 85,000 tickets sold. The previous record of 84,587 was set during a 1954 New York Yankees game at Cleveland Stadium.

Hosted at a pop-up baseball diamond elaborately built into Bristol Motor Speedway, the game will showcase the Atlanta Braves taking on the Cincinnati Reds on Saturday night. Everything about the event is designed to maximize hype, from a nostalgic first pitch featuring two Hall of Famers to accompanying performances from Tim McGraw, Pitbull and Jake Owen and a flurry of NASCAR-related brand activations.

The Bristol game isn’t the MLB’s first special high profile event designed to open the game to potential new fans. Last year, the league introduced a tribute to Black baseball history with the East-West Classic, which returned last month to Birmingham, Alabama’s historic Rickwood Field, former home of Willie Mays and the Negro Leagues’ Black Barons. The MLB has also rewarded its Japanese fans and tapped into Shohei Ohtani fever by kicking off its regular season with a pair of games between the Dodgers and the Cubs played in Tokyo. The series set records as the most-watched MLB games in Japan’s history.

Once the most popular American sport, baseball has slumped in recent decades. Baseball’s fanbase has stagnated compared to the explosive growth of the NFL. Younger viewers are looking beyond traditional sports for entertainment. Well aware of those trends, the MLB is mixing things up to get the sport growing again – including playing on converted NASCAR tracks. The league is also testing out robot umpires, giving star players the anime treatment and even changing up the rules altogether.

The MLB introduced a set of tweaks over the last few years designed to speed up games. Foremost among them was a shorter pitch timer, but the league also made bases bigger to encourage steal attempts and widened runners’ lanes. The barrage of small changes was designed to make the famously plodding sport faster and more dynamic, and the experiment seems to be working: Last year, the average duration of an MLB game dropped down to two hours, 36 minutes – 28 minutes shorter than the 2022 average, making for the quickest games since 1985. 

“You have to continue to capture the next generation, or it is an existential threat to the sport,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told the Los Angeles Times last year. “As much as we love the thought that we are the national pastime, I think resting on your laurels is a really bad business strategy.”