Just two years after being drafted in the first round by the Braves, right-hander Hurston Waldrep, the club's fourth-ranked prospect, was given an assignment Sunday that absolutely no one else in the long history of the Major Leagues had ever received: 1. Rather than start at Triple-A that day, you’ll wake up at 4:45 a.m. for a nearly five-hour drive from Columbus, Ohio, to Bristol, Tenn. 2. Once there, you’ll be asked to pitch at a legendary racetrack that has been converted into a baseball diamond for just one historic MLB game that set a record with more than 90,000 tickets sold. 3. You’ll be entering the contest already behind the eight ball, with two on and one out in the first inning and your team already down a run after rain halted the game the night before. “It’s definitely not how you draw it up,” Waldrep said in perhaps the understatement of the year. Fortunately for Atlanta, the 24-year-old was more than up to the task. After wiggling out of any further damage in the first, Waldrep went on to pitch five more innings, allowing just one run on three hits and two walks with four strikeouts to pick up his first Major League victory in the Braves’ 4-2 win in the 2025 MLB Speedway Classic. “It’s been an unbelievable day,” said Waldrep, whose name fittingly reminded many of NASCAR legend Darrell Waltrip. “Nothing about this game is how you draw it up or perfect. To have that along with the first career win -- I didn’t even think about it until after the game. And then it kind of all sank in.” With five members of the Atlanta rotation currently on the 60-day injured list, they might just want Waldrep to stick around for a while longer.
Maybe they would change is last name to Cartrip and Disney Pixar could dream something up as a computer animation story. Life is a Highway even at 4:45 in the morning. After every strikeout he could say Ka-Chow. You never know these days.
