The Hunger Game: How MLB screwed up the Speedway Classic

Disaster and Chaos reigned in Bristol

Wow. Just wow. The MLB Speedway Classic turned into a complete clustercuss.

Before I describe the scene as I experienced it at Bristol Motor Speedway over the weekend, let me say a few things first.

• I mostly had a good time! My family was with me, and my brother and his family as well. We didn’t get to see much baseball but we had plenty of laughs while dodging raindrops.

• Most of my family lives in Southwest Virginia, so I was happy to see MLB come to an under-appreciated area of the country. SWVa and NE Tennessee are beautiful places filled with beautiful people. Saturday night at BMS was pretty much a bust, but it was good to see some friends, old and new.

• The clustercuss had little to do with the rain. Can’t blame MLB for that. Everything else, well…

Having an MLB game between two fan bases who dominate the area, at the region’s premier sporting complex — "The Last Great Colosseum” — was a stroke of genius. You may not realize it, but there are so many Reds fans in Tennessee and Virginia. My parents live in a town that’s nearly two hours closer to Cincinnati than it is to Virginia’s capital, and the Big Red Machine (plus local radio outlets) turned the area red fifty years ago. TBS seeded Braves fans everywhere in the region during the 1980s and 90s. The Speedway Classic was designed to appeal to tens of thousands of baseball fans who rarely get to see a game in person.

And yet, all I could think on Saturday was that MLB seemed to be completely surprised that a lot of people showed up to a venue that has a capacity of 146,000.

I know Major League Baseball can plan and execute a fantastic event for the fans. Eleven years ago, I saw it first-hand at the All-Star Game in Cincinnati. My kids had a blast at the Fan Zone or whatever they called it that weekend. My brother and one of my nephews went to Atlanta last month for the All-Star festivities, and they had a similar experience.

At Bristol, however, the “Fan Zone” was a disaster. Even five hours before game time, when we arrived, the area was packed, shoulder to shoulder. Lines for food — and everything else — were outrageous, snaking throughout the area so people could barely move. If my kids had been the ages they were at the Cincinnati ASG, they would have come away disappointed with the experience. Everything was packed into an area that appeared to have been designed for 10K rather than 90K.

At some point, we just gave up and went into BMS. Things weren’t much better inside, and not just because they were playing the worst song in history, “Glory Days*,” when we entered.

*Speed ball. If you know, you know.

We were pretty early, so the lines for food were just a tiny bit shorter than they had been in the fan zone. Fortunately, my wife and kids got some pizza and horrifyingly-soggy soft pretzels, and I grabbed a bag of peanuts. I say “fortunately” because that was the last opportunity to eat. More on that in a moment.

The merchandise lines were already out of control inside the venue, just like they were outside. They were so long that we never even tried to get in line, even though we would have purchased a jersey for my son and a shirt for my wife, at the very least. (Oh well, I’ll spend that dough elsewhere, I guess.) We walked around for a bit and checked out the vibe. Saw lots of Reds jerseys, including a Jon Moscot and a Devin Mesoraco. The crowd seemed pretty evenly divided between Reds and Braves fans. It may have been 55-45 in favor of Atlanta, but it was close. Reds fans really showed up for this one, and it was great to run into some friends, old and new.* Then we settled in for the Tim McGraw/Pitbull pregame concert.

*Not as many as I would have liked. Cell coverage was pretty much nonexistent, so I didn’t get a chance to catch up with at least four friends I had hoped to see.

Or, at least, that’s what they told me. The sound system for the concert was so bad that the songs were unintelligible to anyone that wasn’t near the stage or watching on television. Did MLB not anticipate that fans at the track may want to enjoy the well-publicized pre-game concert? We may never know.

Whatever. We were there for baseball so we suffered through a constant drizzling rain and a concert by Charlie Brown’s teacher — but finally, the national anthem was sung and it was time to PLAY BALL. And that’s when the torrential downpour arrived.

As we waited out the rain, I decided to get in one of the enormously long lines to get a hot dog. After all, a hot dog at the ol’ ballyard — or ball track — is one of the great delights on this earth. But after twenty minutes in line, I had advanced only a few feet so I abandoned ship. No hot dog was worth that wait.

That turned out to be a wise decision. My wife did stand in line a bit later, only to be told that they had run out of hot dogs. Only potato chips were still available. They ran out of hot dogs at a baseball game! Before the first pitch had even been thrown!* A guy sitting near us said he spent more than an hour in line only to be told they had no food whatsoever. A caller into WLW said: "They ran out of tomato sauce for the pizza, and were selling the baked dough and pepperoni...full price." I believe it.

*Evidently, they ran out of buns first. Because they were selling hot dogs wrapped in foil instead of encased in a bun.

As the rain slowed and we neared first pitch, fans returned to their seats with ice cream, the only food item that survived The Hunger Game.

Hot dogs with no buns and nachos with no cheese. What a time to be alive. As for me, I had to settle for one measly bag of peanuts. That’s okay; I didn’t need the calories.

This entire disaster was avoidable, and it was completely MLB’s fault. NASCAR hosts races at Bristol every year — sometimes it even rains! — and they don’t have these problems. Partly because NASCAR allows fans to bring their own food into the venue. It was opened in 1961, so it’s understandable that concession offerings aren’t the same as you’d see in modern-day ballparks. But MLB didn’t allow fans to bring in their own food, and to make matters worse, most concession stands didn’t even have all of the windows open to patrons. When you have six cash registers but only three of them manned, it’s going to cause lines to back up.

MLB must not have anticipated that. <facepalm emoji>

The parking situation was also a disaster, but I partly (though not entirely) give MLB a pass for that. I was somewhat familiar with the parking dilemma because I grew up in the area. It’s always crazy at race time. Of course, it was even crazier for this event — and this is something, again, MLB should have been able to anticipate — because at NASCAR races, there are a ton of people who camp on site. Here, many of those campgrounds were converted into parking lots since there were fewer campers. But somehow, even this got screwed up.

In the end, I got to see less than one inning of baseball and I was completely waterlogged in the process. And, though MLB completely screwed up pretty much everything this weekend, I’m actually not mad about it. There is literally nothing on earth that I enjoy more than doing things I’ve never done before. Hanging out with Cincinnati baseball fans away from Cincinnati was fun. And I got a good story out of it, so I’m happy. We’ll be talking about this disaster for years.

Anyway, here are some photos I snapped.