After their hideous breakdowns in Pittsburgh and Chicago, it was nice to see the Cardinals come home and win a ballgame at Busch Stadium.
The Redbirds could exhale and smile a little. It didn’t have to be a masterpiece. Tuesday’s 4-2 victory over the 37-54 Nationals was an escape from negativity and trauma. With a positive outcome in the first of six home games leading into the All-Star break, the Cardinals could move on from the horrors of PNC Park and Wrigley Field.
OK, so I’m being a little dramatic here, but this team certainly needed a win, and a break from the stress. The best cure is winning, and the Cardinals pocketed a dubya from a pitiful Washington club that’s 7-21 since June 7. And now the Birds must claim a few more wins from the Nationals and Braves by sundown on Sunday.
With this little but helpful success, the Cardinals moved back to six games above .500 (49-43) and remained 1 and ½ games out of the NL’s third wild-card slot.
Tuesday’s performance did not lure many fans to Busch Stadium. No surprise there. Rain delayed the start of the game by 2 hours and 14 minutes, and that washed away the fan enthusiasm. But this is also true: the crowd would have been small even on a comfortable night to watch baseball.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but according to ESPN’s attendance tracker, the Cardinals have fallen to No. 15 among the 30 MLB teams in average tickets sold per home game this season. Good grief. The Cardinals have sold fewer tickets per game than the Colorado Rockies, a sad-sack team that’s 50 GAMES UNDER .500 this season at 21-71.
The Cardinals haven’t struggled to sell tickets like this in a very long time, and that’s shocking. According to Baseball Reference, the Cardinals currently rank 11th among the 15 teams in tickets sold.
Coming into the 2025 season – and not including the pandemic-disrupted campaigns of 2020 and 2021 – the Cardinals had drawn at least 3 million fans to Busch Stadium in 24 of the last 25 seasons. The only exception was 2.9 million tickets sold in 2003. St. Louis barely topped the 3 million mark in 2024, and is highly unlikely to get there again.
Needless to say, this is a big change. Going back to 2000, the Cardinals have been first or second in NL home attendance 11 times, third eight times, and fourth three times.
In more than a few baseball summers, the St. Louis fan base outperformed the fans in much larger markets in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. And now it will be a victory if Cardinals fans can win the battle against Rockies fans in 2025. Oh, the suspense! Yes, it’s come to this.
The Cardinals have problems that the endless flow of TV-booth propaganda won’t solve. If anything, the constant Chuckle Hut party is turning viewers off, and ownership-management is apparently oblivious to the reality.
Cardinals fans are disillusioned by ownership, reduced payroll spending, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak’s drift into the mediocre middle. The fans are mad that the Cardinals took everything for granted and kept going with an outdated and underfunded model for baseball success – until it finally went kaput.
And of course there’s this widespread belief: the franchise’s commitment to winning is much less than it should be. Well, that applies to more recent times.
Who am I to argue? I could point out that, under chairman Bill DeWitt Jr.’s leadership over the last 30 seasons, the Cardinals rank fourth among the 30 teams in regular-season wins – and third for most postseason wins. But never mind.
In St. Louis we used to brag about this village as “Baseball Heaven” which annoyed the heck out of the fans and media attached to other big-league teams. And now we’re annoying the fans and media in other places by complaining about how this has turned into a Baseball Hellhole.
The moderate decline of the Cardinals baseball was predictable – but not inevitable. The worst thing DeWitt-Mozeliak did was get complacent and let the farm system and player-development program rot. At least they’re trying to fix it, and Chaim Bloom was the right hire for the project.
Cardinals fans are entitled to their feelings. Team ownership-management decided to spend less money on the major-league payroll. The team’s fans also decided to spend less money … withholding support for a competitive product that hasn’t won a postseason game since 2019.
The Cardinals have lost a lot of loyal fans, and it’s up to the folks who run the franchise to give them reasons to leave their homes and come back to their baseball home.
In the here and the now, Cardinals fans have not responded to this runway-transition-reset-whatever team that’s exceeding expectations. The Cardinals’ offseason marketing messages were preposterously confusing and ineffective. That caused even more anger – or worse, ambivalence among their fans.
There is a little irony here. The Cardinals have a higher winning percentage than several teams that are spending significantly more money on player payroll this season – including Boston, Texas, Atlanta, Seattle, Anaheim, Arizona and Baltimore.
And … the Cardinals are also selling fewer tickets to home games than the 21-71 Rockies. And Colorado, by the way, has a .395 winning percentage (worst in MLB) since the start of the 2019 season.
Obviously, the leaders of the St. Louis franchise have a lot of work to do to regain the trust and support that’s been squandered.
Despite a growing list of problems, the Cards are staying close to wild-card contenders who – with the exception of Milwaukee – have invested more heavily in payroll.
But if we thought Cardinals fans would fall in love with a feisty underdog team … well, it ain’t happening.
The Cardinals have no elite hitters, one very good starter (Sonny Gray), no elite stars, very little star power, and a hugely unpopular president of baseball operations.
The Cards also have a manager who is doing a good job with the mixed-message mess that Mozeliak handed to him. And that manager, Oli Marmol, is mostly disliked because he was hired by that hugely unpopular president of baseball operations.
Marmol will finish his fourth season as the St. Louis manager with a higher winning percentage than Tony La Russa’s winning percentage in his first four seasons as the STL manager.
This simply does not matter; Mozeliak hired Marmol … and therefore Marmol is unqualified and unworthy of the job.
Broadcasters from other teams picked up on the new, negative and troublesome vibrations in 2024.
You may remember the story about the comments made by the San Diego broadcast crew – Don Orsillo and Mark Grant – when the Padres played at Busch Stadium last August.
Here’s the written replay:
Grant: “I’ll be honest with you. I want to get this right out of the way. We are in St. Louis, Busch Stadium. This is not the Busch Stadium I am used to. Late August, early September, usually it’s packed, the Redbirds are in the race. It’s a different vibe here.”
Orsillo: “It’s shocking.”
Grant: “It is shocking.”
Orsillo: “Not used to this here – not ever.”
I smiled at something USA Today baseball columnist Bob Nightengale wrote recently:
“The Cardinals are a real life version of ‘Major League’ (the movie) where the team is winning despite the front office’s attempts for them to fail. The Cardinals didn’t do anything in the offseason, tried to trade third baseman Nolan Arenado, asked ace Sonny Gray to waive his no-clause trade, and planned on waiting until the All-Star break to trade closer Ryan Helsley and starter Erick Fedde ... well, here we are, and the Cardinals aren’t going away.”
The Cardinals may not be going away. But the fans are staying away.
Thanks for reading …
–Bernie
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015. You can access all of his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him weekdays on the “Gashouse Gang” or “Redbird Rush Hour” on KMOX (104.1-FM and 1120-AM) and he is a regular guest on the “Cardinal Territory” video show hosted by Katie Woo of The Athletic. Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast with Will Leitch on the Cardinals.