Bristol Motor Speedway is about to make history.
On Saturday, Aug. 2, competitors will face off to the largest crowd the sport has ever seen, and it will be the first time teams have ventured to the state of Tennessee for a showdown. Fans from nine countries on four different continents and from all 50 U.S. states plus Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands will be on hand to see it all go down. Hall of Famer Chipper Jones will throw out the first pitch.
Wait, what?
Yes, it’s that Bristol. Only it isn’t NASCAR history fans will witness on Saturday. It’s baseball, baby.
The Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds will take to the (temporary) diamond in Bristol’s infield for the first Major League Baseball Speedway Classic. Over 85,000 tickets have been sold, surpassing the MLB single-game record which has stood since 1954. The teams will wear special racing-themed uniforms for the occasion.
Bristol, whose friendly confines are as intimate as it gets for racing, will have some temporary grandstands behind home plate and down the third-base line, but most of the fans will be sitting in the racing grandstands. For baseball, it won’t be like the cozy atmosphere at Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, but that hasn’t stopped the fans from buying tickets in droves.
But this is a NASCAR history column, they said. OK, fine, that’s true. But it’s not a stretch (seventh inning or otherwise) to see that there are parallels between America’s pastime and the thunder that calls fans like a siren song.
I once read somewhere that the reason baseball appeals to fans is that as America became more and more industrial, it represented a simpler time. A pastoral sport in the heart of the grittiest cities, a field of green grass in a concrete jungle.
At its heart, the game is a simple one: hit the ball and run the bases, trying to get to home before the other team can stop you. A ball, a bat and a glove was all any kid needed to play the game and dream the dream.
And, well, racing is that way, too. Although the cars have become more technological in recent years, the sport is, in many ways, a throwback. It still suggests a time when innovation was mechanical instead of digital, when shade-tree mechanics could take a piece of steel and chrome and rubber and create a fearsome beast … and then a driver could tame it, make it purr like a kitten in their hand.
With some high-school mechanics classes, a toolbox and a little love, even a beater a step away from the junkyard could be given new life in the hobby stocks at the local bullring. Just enough to dream the dream.
Like the sandlot urchin who threw the ball against the fence and caught it again for hours on end, the budding racer turning wrenches on a car that looks like nothing much under a stuttering, buggy shop light is the embodiment of the American dream. Maybe they won’t ever make the big leagues — it’s far more likely they won’t — but they dream the same dreams at night.
The two sports, so complex in their simplicity (or maybe simple in their complexity), rely on so many plans. All sports employ strategy, but here, it’s a deep, big-picture plan that is put in place before the national anthem is even sung. And yet, things can change on a dime. It’s about planning and execution, yes, but also about overcoming and redirecting.
NASCAR, like baseball, is steeped in a rich history that is about the cars and drivers but also about fathers and sons and wives and daughters. The deep, almost vocal passion is in the blood, passed from one generation to the next. Fans wax nostalgic because it’s more than just a game. It’s a bond with someone, a connection to a time long past, a reminder of simple days and hot summer nights.
But time doesn’t stop for love or nostalgia. Other sports may be less cerebral but flashy. Basketball and football with near-constant action appeal to the ADD generation of fans brought up on 30-second intervals of on-screen pomp and circumstance.
Baseball and auto racing? Not so much. They play out over hours at their best. And so the powers that be have tried to change them: speed things up, create more drama and, along the way, lose something of their souls. It’s not the players’ faults that their achievements don’t always stack up and seem cheaper somehow.
Analytics and simulations and technology have taken their toll. Racing is still racing and baseball is still baseball, but somehow, they aren’t the same. And while they have to move forward — time marches on and they need to attract fans to survive — they lose a lot along the way. Gimmicks appeal to those who like shiny things and don’t discern between a diamond and a pop top.
Fans resist change, but it’s not just the matter of age that the powers that be try to make it out to be. The difference isn’t simply between old and young but between those who were brought up on something since the day they were born vs. those who discovered it later, played with it awhile and decided it would be fun, at least until something else came along to pull them into the next water-cooler fad.
Racing, for all its noise, isn’t, and isn’t meant to be, three hours of chaos. A ballgame isn’t meant to be nothing but a string of strikeouts and home runs with the occasional brilliant catch.
They can be those things, and when they are, it’s a reminder that you’re seeing something special. But they’re also the other moments: spending lap after lap setting up a pass, planning a pit stop that will be the difference between winning and going home empty handed, having a plan if something goes sideways. They’re fouling off a dozen pitches before singling to right field — unglamorous, perhaps, but enough for a walk-off win.
The two sports whose fans remember and respect their pasts the most collide for a moment this weekend. More the same than different, they must rely on the past to guide the future. Because the reason that the fans come is a love of a game and the deep resonance of a simpler time, one where it was only about the game, the roar of the crowd, the crack of the bat and the growl of the engines.
From the sandlots and the bullrings, they all once dreamed the same dreams. And so do we all. More the same than different.
Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.