BRISTOL, Tenn. — It’s on pace to be the lousiest Atlanta Braves season since 2016, and might end up the worst since the late 1980s, considering their 9-22 record in the past 31 games and the depleted state of their pitching staff.
Yet, tens of thousands of Braves fans turned out for the Speedway Classic game Saturday night in Bristol.
Thousands were also in Cincinnati on Thursday and Friday, making it sound like a Braves home game when Atlanta scored eight in the top of the eighth inning of the series opener. (Before giving up eight in the bottom of the inning, but that’s another story.)
“This year hadn’t gone anywhere close to what we’ve wanted, but we’ve still got fans that are pulling for us on a nightly basis,” Braves third baseman Austin Riley said. “Everywhere we go, there’s a huge group typically behind our dugout. There’s a lot of loyal fans.”
People like Kevin and Stephanie Lanke, a couple from Terre Haute, Indiana. They bought tickets soon after this Speedway Classic game was announced. The Braves’ woeful season was never going to deter them from coming, nor was a calf strain that landed Braves superstar Ronald Acuña Jr. on the 10-day injured list last week.
Kevin and Stephanie Lanke (David O’Brien / The Athletic)
“We were coming either way,” said Kevin, athletic director at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana. “This event is bigger than how the individual year is going. Obviously, we were disappointed Acuña got hurt on Tuesday, but it is what it is, and we’re just excited to be here and represent Braves Nation.”
As they spoke, Braves fans filed out of the Paramount Bristol, a restored downtown theater that was the team’s fan headquarters the past few days. The Braves’ game at Cincinnati on Friday had just aired live on the big screen.
It was for Braves fans from anywhere, but especially those who’d arrived early in Bristol for the series finale, a one-off game Saturday that was expected to draw an MLB-record crowd of more than 85,000 to Bristol Motor Speedway and was played on a field built just for the occasion in the middle of the famous track’s infield.
“Dude, this is awesome,” said Dillon Long, a Braves fan from Toccoa, Georgia, as he glanced around the massive speedway Saturday. He was sitting with his wife, Kaitlan, and their two kids, ages 8 and 9, ready to order dinner from a concession stand on the speedway infield.
The first pitch was delayed nearly 2 1/2 hours by rain, and scheduled Braves starter Spencer Strider was scratched, replaced by Austin Cox. It only began raining hard just before the scheduled first pitch, bringing out the tarps. The game was suspended in the bottom of the first with the Reds leading, 1-0, and will be completed Sunday at 1 p.m.
The Longs had been in Bristol a few days, staying in their RV at the speedway campground. They were at the watch party Friday at the Paramount, a block away from the Birthplace of Country Music Museum.
There’s plenty to do in Bristol, a charming town that straddles the Tennessee-Virginia border. But the Longs were here to see their beloved Braves, regardless of the team’s 46-63 record before Saturday and unaccustomed position near the bottom of the standings in both the division and wild-card races. Their run of seven consecutive postseason appearances, including six National League East titles before last year’s wild-card berth, is almost certainly about to end.
Nevertheless, it’s been a very good seven years to be a Braves fan, they said.
“You know, (a bad season was) always due,” Long said. “You got too many people that think they know everything and how to solve the problems. I’m not that guy. We just love baseball as a family.”
He noted that they are about 2,500th on the waiting list for the Braves’ “A-List” membership, which includes access to special events, discounts on merchandise and other perks. “So we’ll get our shot,” he said, laughing. “But we got these!”
They bought Speedway Classic tickets as soon as they went on sale to the general public in December.
Long can remember when a season like this wasn’t unusual for the Braves, and that’s without going back to the 1980s. Atlanta was third or fourth in the NL East in four consecutive seasons from 2006-2009, finishing 18 games back in the first season of that stretch and going 72-90 to finish in fourth place, 20 games back, in 2008.
“Oh, yeah, in the early 2000s it was tough,” Long said. “But we love the organization from top to bottom. We’ve gone (to minor-league games) from Columbus to Rome to Augusta, Gwinnett, all of them.”
Braves mascot Blooper was also at the Paramount on Friday, along with the Braves’ Heavy Hitters drumline and some former Braves who greeted fans and signed autographs. The fans watched their team lose 3-2 in Cincinnati on the Paramount screen, falling to a confounding 14-27 in one-run games.
“I mean, it’s been tough. Obviously, it’s been tough,” said Kelly Thorndyke, 50, a Braves fan from Greenville, N.C., as he left the Paramount Friday.
He was here for the Speedway Classic and drove over from Greenville with his wife, Lori, and their friend Bobby Williams, 51, a high school basketball coach and assistant baseball coach at D.H. Conley in Greenville. All went to the watch party and the game on Saturday.
The three love their alma mater, East Carolina University in Greenville, and they love the Braves.
“I’m a Dale Murphy guy all my life,” Williams said. “My childhood home still is nothing but Dale Murphy posters that my mom and dad won’t take down out of my childhood room.”
“He’s probably not going to say,” Kelby Thorndyke said of Williams, “but this dude has pictures on Dale Murphy’s front porch.”
Williams smiled and said he didn’t mind if that went public. He loves him some Murph.
“Super human being,” said Williams, who added that his aunt and uncle have Braves season tickets, which also helped stoke his long fandom.
“When I started, the early years, the Murphy years, around ’82, ’83, they struggled,” Williams said. “And then we hit a great stretch. Now, this year has been, obviously, ups and downs. If something bad can happen this year, it’s happened.”
When the Lankes finished work Thursday — Stephanie works for Thomson Reuters and trains CPAs around the country — they got in the car in Terre Haute and drove to Bristol, arriving around 1:30 a.m. Friday.
Lenke said of this 2025 season: “If this is the penalty for (Atlanta winning) the 2021 World Series, it’s okay.”
He smiled when he said that. Age allows him some perspective that some young Braves fans do not have. He doesn’t see this season as a disaster that signals the end of a winning era and the beginning of some dark period in team history.
“This is part of what happens,” with franchises, he said. “There’s ups and downs. I wish they’d have done more at the trade deadline, but it’s okay. You know they’ve got a plan in place. Obviously, Alex (Anthopoulos) knows what he’s doing. The team knows what they’re doing. They wouldn’t have won a World Series in ’21 if they didn’t.”
The Thorndykes said they wished that Anthopoulos, the Braves’ general manager and president of baseball operations, had made at least one or two significant moves at Thursday’s trade deadline, which they said would show that the team is preparing for the future.
They had read and heard so much talk of the Braves being likely to trade one or both of high-profile pending free agents Marcell Ozuna and Raisel Iglesias.
“Ozuna from the Braves,” Lori said, smiling at the reference to an infamous incident when Ozuna told a cop who’d pulled him over for suspicion of drunk driving, at which point Ozuna said “I’m Ozuna from the Braves.”
“I felt bad — Ozuna, Raisel,” Kelby said, naming the players he’d heard were most likely to be traded. “But then I also understand that maybe they’re not getting the value (they sought in trades). And, like (Thursday), do we win that game without Iglesias, if there’s someone else in there?” (Iglesias pitched a scoreless 10th inning for the save at Cincinnati.)
The Thorndykes never considered changing their plans for the Speedway Classic, even as the Braves’ losses and injuries mounted.
“Roller coaster is not the right word,” Thorndyke said, then paused but couldn’t come up with a better one. “I would say, you hope every game…it’s like a new year. You hope every night is going to be like this; this is what they’re going to do from here out.”
He pointed to recent improvement by long-slumping Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies as an example.
“Finally,” he said. “So now I’m like, okay, here they go. Now is everyone else going to come along?”
Lori interjected, “And then Acuña gets hurt. I mean, it’s like there’s always something going on.”
Still, they watch. And watch. Almost every game on TV, and some at Truist Park when they can get to Atlanta.
“At the end of the night,” Kelby Thorndyke said, “I look at her and I say, why the hell did we watch this?”
He smiled. “It’s been tough.”
But they also know that fans of almost every other MLB team would swap places with them and have a team that has been to the postseason the past seven years, won the World Series in 2021, not to mention one that was the so-called “Team of the ’90s” with multiple Hall of Famers, 14 consecutive division titles and a 1995 World Series win.
“We have been spoiled, for sure,” Lori said.
Lanke said he’s one of the many Braves fans whose initial attraction to the team was because of the Braves’ daily presence for six months a year on TBS in the 1970s and 1980s, when Braves and TBS owner Ted Turner’s SuperStation beamed Braves games across North America.
“Oh, for me, they were just so bad when I was growing up,” Lanke said of the Braves, who finished below .500 — usually well below — thirteen times in a 16-year span from 1975 through 1990, before the worst-to-first season in 1991 when they went to the World Series.
“Ninety-one was a miracle,” Lanke said, “and (fans) can get spoiled if they get used to them being that good in the ’90s, if you don’t know how it was before. I’m just glad they got another one in my lifetime. In ’95, when they won, I was in college. But ’21 was just icing on the cake.
“I was a fan in the bad days in the 80s to the good days in the ’90s, and then from (2018) it’s just been great.”
Until this season.
“The season, obviously, hasn’t been what we had hoped, for a lot of reasons,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said before Saturday’s game. “But it’s amazing, the fans that I’ve talked to, how supportive they still are. They’re appreciative of everything we’ve accomplished over the years, and I think they understand, you know, that these things happen.
“Like I’ve said, it’s a special group of people. I’ve seen a lot of Brave jerseys driving in here (to the Speedway Classic), and so I think it’s going to be really special for a lot of people, including us.”
(Top photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)