Reds and Braves Speedway Classic game suspended by rain

Photo: Santosh Kumar. License here.

The Atlanta Braves vs Cincinnati Reds game in Bristol, Tennessee at Bristol Motor Speedway has been suspended by rain in the bottom of the 1st inning. The game is tentatively scheduled to be resumed on Sunday at 1pm ET.

It’s tough to imagine how anyone could have managed just about everything involved in Saturday evening any worse than they did.

Let’s start with what both teams did. They got their starting pitchers loose and ready to go despite the radar being very clear that rain was going to arrive around first pitch and that it wasn’t going to let up all night. Both teams could have just gone with a reliever as an opener and waited to see what was going to happen and get Chase Burns and Spencer Strider loose if things changed. But they didn’t.

The game then didn’t begin on time and there was a delay of over two hours. Atlanta decided to put a reliever in the game when it was going to begin at 9:40pm. The Reds opted to stick with Chase Burns. He didn’t make it more than a few pitches to open the game before it started raining again. But he also made it through the top of the 1st inning with a lineout and two strikeouts.

Things didn’t go so well for Austin Cox and Atlanta as he pitched in a downpour where there were large puddles on the infield as Cincinnati put together three straight singles to take a 1-0 lead before the umpires called on the grounds crew to start bringing every bag of quick dry in existence onto the field and try to turn soup into a solid. It didn’t work and after about 20 minutes of that they then decided to pull the tarp. After 30 minutes of watching it continue to rain and finally looking at and understanding how weather radar maps work, they decided to suspended the game for the rest of the night and try and pick it up tomorrow.

The Reds pretty much wasted a Chase Burns start because both they and Major League Baseball couldn’t look at a radar map.

But if only their blunders on the day were limited to the on-field stuff. Instead many places were out of food before the national anthem was sung at 7:00pm. The fan zone outside of the speedway was reportedly a disaster.

Just about everything that went wrong on Saturday was easily avoidable. You knew you sold 85,000+ tickets. You know how much food people eat at these events. How were you so unprepared that you were out of food before the game began? How did MLB and both teams look at the same radar the rest of us looked at and saw all of that rain coming and decide to warm both starting pitchers up? Just a complete masterclass of mismanagement all around. good job, everyone. Great effort.