Braves to Play Game at Bristol Motor Speedway in 2025

The Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds are scheduled to play a unique-neutral-site game that has a chance to break records.

Ronald Acuña Jr. and the Atlanta Braves are scheduled to play a unique contest in 2025. / Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports

The Atlanta Braves will reportedly play the Cincinnati Reds in a regular season game at the Bristol Motor Speedway in 2025. Multiple sources have told the Athletic that the official announcement will come on Friday. 

The announcement will be held at the track and will include MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and Speedway Motorsports CEO Marcus Smith. Smith is also the son of Bruton Smith, the founder of Speedway Motorsports and Sonic Automotive. 

With a capacity of over 150,000, this has to potential to be one of the highest-attended baseball games ever. The current record is 115,000 fans when the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted the Boston Red Sox for an exhibition game in 2008 at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum - the original LA home of the Dodgers from 1958 to 1961.  

If any game has a chance to break that record, it’s this one. What also differentiates this upcoming game is that it is a regular season game vs the current record coming from an exhibition game. 

However, just like with LA Coliseum, it’ll be interesting to see what the dimensions of this game will look like. Baseball games at LA Coliseum were known for being played with almost no left field to be found. Click here to see what it looked like. 

Baseball is not the first non-motorsport to be held at this site. The Tennessee Volunteers hosted Virginia Tech for a college football neutral site game dubbed the “Battle at Bristol” back in 2016. 

So this venue has experience staging neutral site games in non-traditional venues, but football fits into this stadium’s shape perfectly. A square gridiron field and a baseball are not the same. 

Some seats that usually have good sightlines might not be as good as they usually are. Maybe instead of angling it like did in Los Angeles, they split the difference and chop off both outfield corners like it’s the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. Have an absurdly deep center field and every fly ball down the line is a home run and making Yankee hitters jealous the whole time with how short of a porch there is.

We’ll know soon enough.