The Cincinnati Reds are set to play the Atlanta Braves in the Speedway Classic at Bristol Motor Speedway on Aug. 2.

It was the summer of 2021, and the telephone lines and email inboxes at Major League Baseball’s headquarters were buzzing.

The Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees had just played a thriller on a diamond built into an Iowa cornfield straight out of the movie “Field of Dreams.” The event was an immediate smash, drawing the most viewers for any regular-season contest since 2005 and injecting a surge of adrenaline into an otherwise sleepy time of the year.

Now, officials from nontraditional venues around the country were reaching out to MLB with a version of the same question: What would it take to hold a game at our place?

“We are open for business when it comes to ideas about where we put our special event games,” said Jeremiah Yolkut, MLB’s senior vice president for global events. “We want to bring the game to more people.”

On Saturday night, MLB will unveil perhaps its wildest location yet: a place where rubber is usually burned at 200 miles per hour instead of on the pitcher’s mound. The Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds will meet on the infield of Bristol Motor Speedway, a racetrack in Bristol, Tenn., usually reserved for Nascar.

And it’s about to draw the largest crowd in history for a regular-season baseball game. More than 85,000 tickets have been sold, breaking the all-time record previously set at Cleveland Stadium in 1954.

“You have to continue to meet fans with what they want,” Yolkut said. “People want these experiences that are above and beyond a normal offering that you give them on a regular basis.”

The Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees played a game at the Field of Dreams in 2021.

It’s no secret that baseball has struggled at times to attract a national audience to its regular season. ESPN opted out of its deal with MLB after 35 years because the network no longer believed that a package that largely revolved around Sunday Night Baseball was worth the $550 million it was paying annually.

These “specialty games” are more than just a novelty. They are quickly becoming an important part of the league’s business—with MLB actively searching for weirder and more creative sites.

The league has been experimenting with nontraditional venues for nearly a decade. The Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina hosted a game in 2016. The Little League Classic in Williamsport, Pa., began a year later and has since developed into an annual tradition in the home city of the Little League World Series. Last season, MLB held a tribute to Willie Mays and the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field in Alabama, America’s oldest ballpark and the former home of the Birmingham Black Barons.

At the Field of Dreams, Fox opened the broadcast with a chills-inducing moment—Kevin Costner, the star of the 1989 film, emerging from the cornfield and onto the diamond, followed by the White Sox and Yankees players. At Rickwood, Fox showed the top of the fifth inning in black and white, along with other effects to emulate a telecast from the 1950s.

“You can never satiate the fans’ interest in doing bigger and better things,” Yolkut said. “We continue to want to meet that interest.”

The St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants played a game last season at America’s oldest ballpark Rickwood Field.

There are challenges when it comes to specialty games, particularly for players. One-off events like the Speedway Classic require teams to travel to an unfamiliar city for a single game and play on a field that might not be as pristine as a typical MLB park. But those concerns are secondary to baseball’s larger campaign to present America’s pastime in surprising new ways.

From the end of the NBA Finals in late June to the start of college football in late August, baseball owns the sports calendar. The problem is that it might also be the dullest part of the season.

Patrick Crakes, a sports media consultant and former Fox Sports senior executive, believes that other sports will recognize that there is a summertime hole and eventually adjust their schedules to fill it. For now, though, it’s up to baseball to make the most of it.

“There has to be innovation in scheduling somehow that takes advantage of these periods,” he said.