BRISTOL, Tenn. AP - Bristol Motor Speedway is ready to make history by hosting the first Major League Baseball game in Tennessee.
The stage, or in this case the racetrack, has been set for the biggest crowd for a regular season baseball game at Saturday night's MLB Speedway Classic between the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds.
"The way the venue looks really is something that you can put on paper, but you really can't get a true vision of it until you actually put grandstands on the infield of the track, and you put 3,500 seats in the middle of 87,000 seats," Jeremiah Yolkut, MLB's senior vice president of global events, said Friday.
"Those things just don't become a reality until you actually see them."
What fans will see Saturday is a baseball diamond tucked inside the infield of the half-mile bullring at Bristol. A temporary grandstand wraps around both sidelines with a press box at the top. The track's Colossus videoboard hovers over foul territory along the third base line. Any balls hit off Colossus will be foul.