The nation\u2019s sports map bears scant resemblance to other maps. Wise County may be in Virginia, and we may think that Virginia is oriented toward Washington-based sports teams. Part of Virginia certainly is, but there\u2019s another part of Virginia whose sports allegiances are quite different. That part is Southwest Virginia (and perhaps much of Southside, too).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Many Reds fans come out of Southwest Virginia because the team\u2019s radio network has long extended into Appalachia. You can hear the Reds on seven stations in West Virginia, mostly the western and southern part of the state. You can hear the Reds on two stations in Virginia, in Abingdon and Wise. You can even hear the Reds on two stations in Tennessee \u2014 one of those in the Bristol-Kingsport-Johnson City market.<\/p>\n
By contrast, the Washington Nationals radio network extends only as far as Lynchburg and Martinsville.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve often written columns to remind Virginians of all the ways our diverse state is connected \u2014 school funding in rural communities depends on the economic health of Northern Virginia, so any downturn there connected to federal cutbacks will be felt throughout the state<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve also written columns to remind fellow Virginians of how different some parts of the state are \u2014 such as the column about how few of our statewide candidates have been to Lee County<\/a>, our westernmost county, and what candidates could learn from visiting the state\u2019s southwestern corner<\/a> even if they don\u2019t find many votes there.<\/p>\n This is one of those.<\/p>\n On Saturday, Major League Baseball will send two of its teams to play a regular-season game at the Bristol Motor Speedway. The racetrack \u2014 \u201cThe Last Great Colosseum,\u201d some call it \u2014 is 8 miles into Tennessee, but it\u2019s still in the Bristol market and part of that Bristol market is in Virginia, so this game is close enough for us to care about, not because of what it means athletically but what it signifies culturally.<\/p>\n This game is part of a nine-year series of \u201cspecialty games\u201d that Major League Baseball has staged at locations other than its usual stadiums since 2016. Five of those have been at Williamsport, Pennsylvania, site of the Little League World Series. Others have been at Omaha, Nebraska, in conjunction with the College World Series; at Dyersville, Iowa, to honor the movie \u201cField of Dreams;\u201d at Birmingham, Alabama, to honor the old Negro Leagues (the Birmingham Black Barons were a famous team); at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to honor service members. This is sort of baseball\u2019s equivalent to the National Hockey League\u2019s Winter Classic where it holds a game outside (which some hard-core hockey fans will tell you is the true spirit of the frozen sport).\u00a0<\/p>\n The two teams that will take the field (one specially prepared by the famed Roanoke Valley-based groundskeeper Murray Cook<\/a>) in Bristol on Saturday night weren\u2019t chosen at random. They are the Atlanta Braves and the Cincinnati Reds, two teams that used broadcasting to stretch their fan base. The Reds will be the home team on Saturday. Officially, that\u2019s because the Reds are giving up a home game for this one; the first two games of the three-game series with the Braves will be in Cincinnati. Unofficially, though, the Reds are the home team because, culturally and historically speaking, they are.<\/p>\n The Reds\u2019 radio network has long extended into Southwest Virginia, long enough for Dotson to have grown up listening to the team. Before the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta for the 1965 season, there were no Major League teams in the South, which left the South open to marketing for other teams. By many fan accounts, the Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals were the teams that did the most to fill that void. In 1976, Ted Turner both bought the Braves and launched the TBS \u201csuperstation.\u201d One outgrowth of that: Braves games were broadcast nationwide, the first pro sports teams whose games were available so widely. That helped build a national fan base, but especially so in the South. To this day, you can still pick up Braves games on Roanoke radio \u2014 but not Washington Nationals games.<\/p>\n Vivid Seats, the ticket-selling agency, has produced maps that show which team is the favorite in each county in the country, based on who\u2019s buying tickets to what. That naturally skews toward the nearest teams geographically \u2014 if you\u2019re a Seattle Mariners fan in Virginia, you\u2019re probably not buying tickets to their home games, you\u2019re buying tickets to a road game. By that standard, the map may more accurately reflect which stadiums people are most likely to visit, rather than the home team. Still, the map<\/a> shows the Cincinnati Reds reach into Southwest Virginia while the Atlanta Braves dominate (with some exceptions) as far north as Bath County. Among those exceptions: Vivid Seats customers in Floyd County (which admittedly might be a small sample size) buy more tickets to Pittsburgh Pirates games than any other. Interest in going to Washington Nationals games runs pretty thin once you get south of Charlottesville.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just baseball. The Vivid Seats map for football<\/a> is much the same. The Washington Commanders dominate as far as Wythe County. Across most of Southwest Virginia and much of Southside, the top team is the Charlotte-based Carolina Panthers. A few exceptions pop up: In Scott County we see the Cincinnati influence again, because the Cincinnati Bengals are tops there.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is more than just about sports. This is about how we see ourselves. It\u2019s natural that the more northern parts of the state look toward Washington. (I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley, where most of the television channels available in the pre-cable, pre-satellite era were out of D.C.) Our fellow Virginians should understand that there are some of us in the southern part of the state who look elsewhere for sports allegiances. It\u2019s not simply that we root for different teams, it\u2019s that we see ourselves differently \u2014 because we are different.<\/p>\n In 2016, two geographers drew a map of the U.S. economy<\/a> based on commuting patterns. They found that Virginia was divided into five different economies: four big ones plus a piece of Tazewell County that\u2019s tied to West Virginia around Bluefield. Their map shows Southwest Virginia more economically oriented toward Tennessee, with the Roanoke Valley and New River Valley more connected with North Carolina than we are with the rest of our own state. (Wytheville is roughly the dividing line).<\/p>\n There are policy implications to all this. By necessity, we pass laws on a statewide basis, but our economy isn\u2019t shaped for a one-size-fits-all solution. If our next governor doesn\u2019t understand this, she will soon enough. Perhaps that\u2019s a reason why all the statewide candidates should take Saturday night off and go attend a baseball game in Tennessee \u2014 and while they\u2019re in the neighborhood, they could also go visit Lee County, some of them for the first time.<\/a><\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1628373472271416233.jpg\")
An aerial view of the field at the Bristol Motor Speedway. Courtesy of Major League Baseball.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/geography_communting_map.png\")
Here\u2019s what the United States would look like if its states were redrawn along economic lines. Courtesy of \u201cAn Economic Geography of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n