Angry St. Louis Cardinals fans: SPOILED or Justified?

Angry St. Louis Cardinals fans: SPOILED or Justified?

Here’s Prody Brazil. If you’ve got a future video that I should be doing or a topic that I should be covering here on the YouTube channel, phone it in and let me know about it. 8334 Brody. You leave a voicemail. I listen to all of the calls and I get to play back and respond to the very best ones like right here on a future video. Hey Brody, it’s Taylor from Missouri. I listen frequently. Thank you. I’m a St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan. I live in Missouri. There’s a lot of talk here about the Cardinals attendance woos. For the second year in a row, they’re going to draw under 3 million fans after about 30 straight years of being one of the top five drawing uh fan bases in attendance. Yep. And I I saw some statistics the other day about how teams that are doing much better than the Cardinals this year, like the Detroit Tigers, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Seattle Mariners, are barely ahead of the Cardinals. And I understand that when you’re used to top five and you’re down in the low teens, it it can seem staggering, but even some franchises like the Royals, which, you know, have been pretty much in a playoff hunt until up until now, they’re drawn 6,000 less fans than the Cardinals. I’m going to just take a stab at this and say that I don’t know that it’s necessarily a Cardinals problem as much as it is a baseball problem. feel like baseball attendance is down across the board. And what does baseball need to do? I mean, they’ve tried to do some rule changes to get casual fans interested to the chagrin of some of us old school guys, but do you think baseball needs to do more to fix it? And I also want to know, baseball’s kind of been number two solidly for several decades. Do you see them slipping below NBA or NHL as far as the number two sport in America? Thanks. Yeah, Taylor, I mean, you just gave me so many video ideas. Uh, I do think baseball is not number two. NFL is number one. I mean, college football might be number 1A or number two, and then basketball after that. I think baseball and hockey are closer than a lot of people think in this day and age. So many different things. We can talk about overall baseball attendance, and I will do that video later on, Taylor. I I promise you. But the first thing you bring up, the Cardinals topic and their fan base and how attendance is down and how the fans are really upset in St. Louis about this baseball team. I don’t want to say kind of all of a sudden, but it does seem like the last several years have been a big trend down. And in fact, let’s just pull up the bar graph right now to show you how attendance has gone. That’s what this video is going to be all about. The kind of demise of the Cardinals, but also how the fans seem really upset and to the point where have the fans been super spoiled for a lot of years and that’s okay. Like they’ve had it great and now they’re not used to this. or are the fans justified in their disappointment? And in this case, not showing up. Look at the attendance here. Pretty solid. I mean, 40 something thousand. And I think I started this 2005. That would be old Bush Stadium, Bush Stadium 2. So now in 2006, we’re on to Bush Stadium 3, the current brand new stadium in downtown St. Louis. And the attendance again had been great up until obviously 2020. It takes that huge dip. It goes to zero. like don’t mind that big uh sliver out of out of this equation here. But what you’re starting to see in 2021, that’s when fans came back. All right, so it’s not the number you’d expect. 2022, it’s kind of right back up there. 23, it dips a little bit. 24, it dips even more. And here’s 2025. My goodness, they’re averaging something like 27,000 plus per game this year to go from 42 to 27. I’ll take that line away. I mean, you can clearly see how we’re kind of just falling off a cliff right there. And suddenly after all these years of consistent numbers and a consistent bar that had been set by attendance alone, and look, if we’re gauging fan reaction to the the way the team has been run and to the competitive nature of the team and decision-m process, like what else could be happening in St. Louis that would cause that dip? There’s no other baseball team nearby. There’s nothing else that I can think of that makes a lot of sense unless ticket prices got raised by a ton. But I haven’t heard much about that part of it. And maybe some of that is true. So, let me know. If you’re a Cardinals fan, can you help me can you help me understand or can you explain what’s going on here? because I think I’m about to cover some things that are leading to absolutely this and how how fans are disappointed and how there was a game of a 17,000 attendance mark back in late August which was the lowest ever of this new Bush stadium. So I can name a a bunch of different things but let me know if there’s something specific for you because when we take a look at how the Cardinals have been spending there might also be something there. Now let me just take a step back. Spending does not always equal winning, but spending does open up the opportunity for your team to be good and have chances at the playoffs and extend a window. Like if you’ve got a young core of players and they’re going to be around for a while, you got to pay them so that they stay so that your team can have that window of competition for as long as possible. But in terms of spending, I mean, look, you can draw that upward trajectory there and that line, but wait a second. You might notice a difference there between 2024 and where 2025 is at. The payroll this season for the Cardinals got slashed about $60 million. Like, and again, it just went up up up. And maybe this is too high. Maybe at some points you regret that spending. And maybe this is the compensation for it. Maybe this is the question marks of like what about our regional sports network contract and deal like we’re getting 25 million less so we need to we need to cut our payroll a little bit or a lot of questions even last year’s attendance wasn’t good so we’ve got to cut we’ve got to end up down here versus being back up here close to 200 million I think they were 189 million I’ll have that exact number for you on the next slide but this drop is what has concerned a lot of people it’s given a lot of fans the reason to say wait a second what happened to our team? And it’s not just the payroll. There have been some trades that were made, fans weren’t happy about. There were some trades that couldn’t happen because of no trade clauses that that fans wanted kind of a clean slate, and there were players that could not be unloaded at this past trade deadline. So, that’s the Cardinals payroll. Again, it paints a picture of going the right way with inflation and trending with what a competitive team in baseball is. I mean, there’s a lot of baseball teams that are just consistently spending down here still, right? It’s the halves and the have nots or the try and the try nots, it seems like in Major League Baseball. So, I do understand the dip in payroll is why fans might be saying, “Wait, what what’s going on here? Are we not trying?” How about records in results? I mean, at the end of the day, this should be everything. And you may notice here, what I’ve done is highlight all the seasons with a winning record in gold there. That means just the one, two, three seasons here that are in white, those are the only seasons. And I know this one isn’t complete. I’m pretty sure the Cardinals are going to have a losing record this year, but if I’m doing the math, that’s three total losing seasons in the last 20 years. And they’ve also won a World Series here, won a World Series here. They made the playoffs five straight years here, four years in a row here. I realize they only won a single playoff game in the last 10 years, but look, they have been competitive. All this right here, they have been in the mixed in the mixed. They have been in the midst and in the mix of contention for regular seasons and beyond. And yeah, I get it. That’s a lot of wild card appearances and that’s a lot of that’s a lot of losing getting swept in in the NLCS in 2019, but they’ve been there. Okay, so you can see here kind of a quick fall-off. They’ve not made the playoffs in the last two years. It’s probably it’s going to be three years now, but not even a winning record this season. I’m saying here at some point when you’re a fan of a team, don’t you have to understand that these years come with the territory as much as those runs come with the territory as much as winning two World Series is great in the last 20 years. That comes with the territory. But I mean, are we are we really that down on this part or is it this entire part right here? What’s the part where Cardinals fans are really disappointed with how things are going? Is it the last two years or is it the last 10 years? I don’t know because I can’t see how they’ve they’ve fallen off so quickly. Here are some of the reasons I understand that they’re upset. One playoff win in the last 10 seasons. Ownership. I think going into this season, it was last winter when the Dit family said something to the the extent of, “Well, we know fans aren’t pleased. We know that they didn’t show up last year even to a certain degree and this year it’s obviously been even worse. But they talked about a number of things including the game day experience, improving the game day experience at Bush Stadium. And the fan reaction was, “Wait a second, this has nothing to do with the stadium or the amenities or the hot dogs you’re serving. This is only about one thing, the baseball team. Put your focus on the right thing here. Has nothing to do with the stadium. That’s not why they’re not showing up as they used to.” Yeah, spending last year went from $189 million opening day to $127 this year in 2025. Like that is that is a significant cut right there. $60 million from one year to the next. Now look, I’ve said it before and and look, there’s there’s not really shame in the $127 million mark. It’s not up to where they used to be. But the question is, should you really be spending that amount every single year? If you’re not ready to go for it, I’m okay with scaling it back some years, understanding there might be a lean or two years to try and get you to the next good year. And then you can spend as as much as your heart can or as much as the luxury tax can. But the point is here, I’m I guess I’m I’m okay with that so long as there’s a plan. But maybe there’s not exactly the plan that Cardinals fans can see so transparently. Like maybe it’s not all laid out on the table because even internally there’s this weird transition. Their president of baseball operations and their general manager John Mosa, he’s been in the GM and and president uh role since 2008. He’s been with the team for more than 20 years, but he’s being replaced at the end of this season by him Bloom. Now, this transition was announced at the end of last season to happen right now, a year later. And it’s not to say that John Mos has not been doing the job to the best of his ability. And but it’s just a weird situation. Normally, when you’re ready to cut ties and move on, you do. So, you don’t have like the year of turnover period where Heim Bloom figures things out. And I get it. Maybe there’s a feeling of like, what is this season? What is this year all about of transition? If you’re going to make the jump and you already know who’s going to get the job, why wouldn’t you already start going in that direction? And again, I’m not I’m not entrenched in the day-to-day of the St. Louis Cardinals operation, but I’m saying this from the outside. It’s curious. This is unique. You don’t see this happen a lot. And I think that’s for a reason. If you are going to make this switch and transition, unless Heiml Bloom doesn’t have the background or the pedigree that you were looking for and this year was kind of about getting him up to speed for that operation, okay, then maybe that’s it. But I don’t know that the fans are clearly seeing like exactly the game plan from the front office standpoint. And this season at the trade deadline, they traded away some good players, especially on the back end of their bullpen, but they also couldn’t unload some regular players of contracts that maybe they wanted to move on from. So, it was kind of a frustrating deadline. They were definitely not buying. They were definitely not standing pat. They were trying to unload, but couldn’t necessarily get rid of all the pieces that they wanted to move on from. roster moves, lack of direction. I get all of this lack of success, losing record, but again, only the third losing record in the last 20 basically plus years. So, I get the reasons. Like, I I understand why fans might be upset, but is it justified or have they been a little bit spoiled? Is all of this anger like so quickly? And I’m I’m somebody who understands that when fans are upset, they send their message by not showing up as much or they’re not as interested anymore. That’s just human nature. We all get that. But it happened so quickly in St. Louis and to such a significant degree. August 25th of this season, this past season, this current season still, uh, when the Pittsburgh Pirates came in for a series opener, the attendance was 17,675, the lowest recorded announced attendance in Bush Stadium 3 history minus, and I’ll put the little Oops, forgot to forgot to put the star there. I’ll put the star there because we’re talking about non-COVID, non-pandemic seasons, but yeah, the lowest attendance in the stadium’s history in 20 plus years happened this year. And again, this season’s only the third losing season in the last 20. Take a look at the Pittsburgh Pirates. They’ve only had three winning seasons in the last 33 years, and they’re not showing up either. They’re they’re very frustrated to a large degree. I’ve made plenty of videos about the Pirates fan base, but the point is here, the Cardinals are on the right side of of a track record and the right side of where things have been. spending and if that’s if that’s the main thing, spending doesn’t guarantee you to win. It only keeps your window open. Change is undoubted undoubtedly coming. Like you can understand the transition that’s going to happen. You can be upset by it or you can question why the fact that it’s a year process of transition. I question it too, but change is coming, right? Different people maybe different motivations and hopefully a different direction. So, it brings me to all of this at the very end of the conversation, which has probably gone on too long already. Are Cardinals fans, have they been spoiled and are they reacting too quickly here? Or is all of this justified because of the things they see they know are not right? They’re calling it out. They’re not even waiting very long to call it out. You let me know. Are you a St. Louis fan? Are you just a a baseball fan who’s watching the Cardinal situation? Let me know what you think about all this in the comments section below. Also, thumbs up while you’re down there. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. I would definitely love to see you back here next time.

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