Bill DeWitt III: Cardinals Insider Podcast | St. Louis Cardinals

Bill DeWitt III: Cardinals Insider Podcast | St. Louis Cardinals

Welcome into our Bush Stadium studios. Another edition of the Cardinals Insider podcast, Brett McMillan, Elizabeth Mine. And let’s get right to it. Our guest today, the president of the St. Louis Cardinals, Bill Dit III. Bill, thank you for uh making making the time to come on down. You’ve probably been in here before. Have you seen the new digs, Amy and crew, uh really did a nice job. Lots of moments. Yeah, this is cool. I um I’m used to just sort of the generic Cameo X stuff. Uh but you guys have really spruced it up. It looks good. it uh it’s fun to look around and see all the different moments from Cardinals history and that kind of got me thinking one of the things as we were talking through guest was you know we wanted to have you on because so much history with your family in St. baseball and so I started to try to do the math but I thought you know what Bill probably knows like how many years overall have you guys been involved Browns Cardinals do you know that number off the top of your head I don’t um maybe you could help me with the math a lot a lot of years but my you know my grandfather started in um the front office working for Brand Tricky back in the early part of the 19 20th century and um he I think was doing concessions actually prior to that and then jumped in with with Branch Truck and he was kind of did everything for him and then he rose up through the ranks in the Cardinals organization became treasurer in the 30s and um you know would have been a cool career in and of itself. Uh he saw those world championship teams he helped him build out that first farm system and um always attributed Bran Tricky to being his mentor and start in the game and then he went on to a bunch of other things. I’ll just summarize him really quick. Um he did um a stint with the Browns obviously famously kind of for my dad who grew up in that environment as a Browns fan because he was the general manager and owner at one point sold the club to Bill Vak and the famous Eddie Goodell story with the uh my dad’s uniform and um you know other other great stories. And then he moved on to when he sold the Browns to the group that ended up moving him to Baltimore in 54 was their first season. He went on and did a few things in the commissioner’s office. Then he worked for the Yankees for a couple years as assistant general manager. Then he moved to the Tigers in the late 50s as general manager. And um then his big move really in life was to uh buy the Cincinnati Reds in the early 60s. And um while my parents both grew up in C or St. Louis rather um you know that was such a big deal for the family they moved there and so he sold the Reds in the late 60s but my parents just stayed there and raised our family there. So I grew up a Reds fan going to the big red machine games and stuff but I had always heard about the Cardinals and the history and the years with the Browns. Um, and just to wrap the story, my grandfather’s final stint in baseball was with Bill Ve again. They reunited to do something with the White Socks. He bought the White Socks back in the early 70s with Ve, but he always had that itch, you know, and so he um decided, uh, if I ever have a chance to get back in, I’d like to. And that chance occurred. The first time actually was with the Texas Rangers where he pulled in George W. Bush and a bunch of other friends who he had done some business with to buy the Rangers. And um that was a cool project for them and for my dad, mom and stuff for a few years, but he wanted to be the guy because he he’d seen his dad do that. And so when the Cardinals thing happened, that was 1996, and he finally had that that role with a team where, you know, he was the decision maker. And um I don’t even know how I got on this topic. What was your original question? how long you guys had been in baseball in St. Louis, but this is exactly answer the question. Yeah. Well, because you were director, were you director of marketing? I mean, because you came in pretty much with your your dad when you guys took over the Cardinals and you were director of marketing like during the Magguire years, correct? For the Cardinals. Is that right? That’s right. Yeah. I jumped in and did a bunch of projects. Um, really kind of like business development projects. We worked with Vicki Bryan, who’s still with us in the organization, and on a bunch of uh concession redoss. Uh, one of the big projects I jumped into right away was the um the Jupiter Spring Training Complex. We had been in St. Pete for many, many years, 50 plus, I think, or and um there was a new development on the East Coast that the Braves and the Expos had been partners on. And then the Braves bailed on the deal and went to Orlando to do a deal with Disney, the worldwide of sports, wide world sports thing. it left leaving a vacancy for that other team and the Rays had just been announced as an expansion team. We kind of thought that would maybe take the bloom off the spring training rows in Tampa. Didn’t end up being true, but um so we said, “Well, let’s try it on the East Coast.” We did that. And so that was one one of my big projects was just helping finalize the design for that stadium. Now we’re doing a big renovation. It makes me feel pretty old because when you work on a new project, it just in your mind it’s never old. You know what I mean? Like I don’t know. It’s just weird to me that we’re redoing that. But um that was one of my first big projects. And then uh did a bunch of other things. And then the big one was the St. Louis project. You know, obviously Bush Stadium, Ballpark Village, you know, the whole sequencing of that u finding partners and construction folks and design work and all that. So, I would say prior to this role as team president, those were the big ones that maybe prepared me or at least, you know, threw me into the fire of Cardinals baseball and and what our vision was for our physical plant. when know Brett and I were reminiscing about we’re like when was the first time we we met you know Bill and we’re like it was our first day as employees because I remember when I started back in 2016 you know I’m sitting there for my orientation with HR and I look down at my list and there’s a meeting with the team president and the HR representative at the time explained to me you know Bill wanted to make sure that like the company’s expanding you know we’re hiring a lot more people and he wanted to make sure that he recognized every face that worked for for him and I I know Brett said you guys even got into a Cardinals history discussion because you wanted to make sure I remember uh talking a little talking a little bit of that. Um yeah, it neat experience. It always struck me, Bill. I think it’s neat that you do that. I presume maybe still do, although there’s a lot more faces around here than than there used to be. But cool for us as employees just to have that touch point. Um and then getting to know you, you know, you’re around, you’re accessible certainly. Why was that something that was important to you to do with new folks when they would roll through? Yeah, I mean, I’ve kind of heard some of those stories as well, and it it never ceases to surprise and amaze me and delight me that it does have an impact, you know. Um um I think that um when somebody comes in, they they want to sort of know who’s running it and all of that. So, yeah, I I do I do like to meet everybody. What we do now is over the course of like a couple of months if there’s three or four new people or whatever, we’ll just aggregate everybody into a lunch meeting and I think I have one of those tomorrow for some new people. So, um, and then we just kind of go around the horn. Where’d you come from? What’d you do before this? And I tell them about what I do. So, uh, that’s a really fun thing for me. Um, and it just it kind of reminds me of like when I was in high school and, um, the principal made it a point to remember everyone’s name. I’m actually pretty bad at names. You you’ve remembered mine. I was impressed the other day and I was like, you know, the from that first meeting till now, I was like, he’s he’s never forgotten my name. So, if you have, you’ve covered them. I mean, most people I do. But, I mean, like we have a lot of younger folks who might just come in for a year or summer internship or those are the harder ones. But, um, anyway, that was that always impressed me when I was in high school when when the principal knew everybody’s names. I’m like, he’s got to have a cheat sheet somewhere in his pocket or a Facebook that he can refer to or or something. But um yeah, those are those are fun things to think about. I feel I feel like it showed a level of care, a level of care in detail about the Cardinals organization and what you felt it meant, you know, for people to work here and and kind of our our perception publicly as well that, you know, this is important in St. Louis and that this makes a difference to people and this means something to them. Yeah. And I think the size of our business is conducive to um I wouldn’t say quite family atmosphere or family environment, but like close to that, you know, where people feel comfortable and they feel like they’re in a place that can lead to relationships uh outside of work. Um just friendly ones and whatever. But um you know, we’re about 300 here in St. And um of course it swells in the in the peak season with temps and things, but and then there’s a whole bunch of people not in St. Louis who might be in the player development system or the coaches and the medical and strength and conditioning, all that group, and then of course the players. But you add all that up and you’re in the 400 to 500. But I think for those of us who are here in St. Louis at headquarters, Bush Stadium. Um, it’s nice to know that that size is conducive to sort of knowing who everyone is. That brings to an interesting point talking about logistics with staff, you know, a feeling. Um, I want to go back to those two building projects you talked about, Jupiter way back when and now things full circle and then building this building. What like what’s the process for that as you look at it high level to say okay we need to fold in this and that are you thinking about logistics of what has to be in a service level of a building of fan experience of aesthetic I would imagine maybe all of the above how do you at an executive level start wrapping your brain around either one of those projects well I mean the nice thing about what we had already is a was a great staff and long-term um stable business of of employees and things. So, when it came time to like design the clubhouse of Jupiter, for example, I mean, I just grabbed Buddy Bates. I’m like, “Buddy, how do we, you know, let’s look at plans together and you tell me?” I didn’t know anything. So, it was really just more of a a collaborative organizational sort of role. When I started to add my two cents into things, it would be things that I felt that either people had conflicting opinions about or um maybe it was more of the aesthetic piece of it where I did a lot of homework on, you know, look and feel. I I I had good relationships with the architects to understand where they wanted to take it and occasionally I’d have an opinion there about moving it in a different direction. So, Um, I I I chose my lanes carefully as to when I wanted to make my mark on something and when I wanted to just facilitate a really productive conversation about the logistics of the building or whatever. I know that I’ve seen you before like at a portable getting a hot dog like during a game like I’ I’ve see you around the building. So, as you have taken it in over your time here, what do you always hope that a fan experience feels like? I mean, top line when you come to Bush Stadium because I know that you and and your father and your family like very much are Cardinal fans even though you’re obviously working in the business in a big way. Yeah. I mean, it all starts with the fans really. I mean, the business is nothing without them. And um in terms of the fan experience, um people ask me a lot like what’s it like watching a game? I I’m like it’s just like you guys. I’m a fan. I want us to win. I mean, there’s a little extra writing on it because of the business piece of it, but you also think about it beyond just like a a single game byame thing, too. You’re thinking about what the unfolding season means for next year and for planning. you’re thinking about um you know what like uh just last week we had this crazy rainstorm that flooded our you know lower part of our dugouts and a couple other little low rooms and I’m like how do we fix that you know what do we have to do and there uh so a fan isn’t thinking about like next steps of a thing that occurs I think when you’re in the business you start just a lot more goes through your head when stuff happens Um, and uh, but you you also um, want to get a feel for what it’s just like to be a fan. So, yeah, I’ll walk around the concourse and be a little incognito and um, grab a dog or go to the Grateful Dead night and see buddies up there and hopefully we didn’t just blow your cover. But I don’t mind it. You know, there are some owners who relish it and they’ll go out and um almost like try to engage in a million conversations a night and sort of be like that out there. I that’s not really my personality, although I’m happy to do some of that. Um but I think you have to be kind of true to your personality. If for me it would be fake if I was out there like, you know, um patting fans on the back and you know, it’s just not me. What but I do very much care about the fans and and what they’re experiencing. And so I’ll try to um walk around and go and sit in a different seat or do this or that. Uh when my son does his um little league game, I always make a point to sit out in the upper deck where their seats are after they do the parade on the field and uh and then go up into the um upper deck in the outfield. U because that is a different experience quite frankly. I mean, we can get a little immune to thinking uh what we’re experiencing in the front row or in the suite is what everyone’s experiencing, and that’s not the case. One of the things I really liked about the Savannah Bananas and um when they were here is that the show was on the field, but there was all sorts of other things that they um were pushing on to engage fans in different zones of the ballpark. And whether it’s just some dumb t-shirt throw in left field or whether it’s um some characters acting out in the concourse or you know I mean you know they’ve got all these crazy stuff. Um I don’t think we want to be quite that every night because 81 games of that would be a little much but um we definitely learned some things about how maybe you can engage the full range of everybody in the ballpark at different literally physical levels and different financial levels. Well, I know that, you know, we started to implement some of those things this year with things like the $5 beer and hot dogs in Budweiser Terrace on Friday nights. Um, and you know, one thing that I feel like Brett and I were discussing, um, you know, before we started filming today, is that I feel like in our time here, we’ve both been here probably around nine or 10 years. Um, I feel like there’s been more changes behind the scenes over the past two years, both on the on the baseball side and the business side, um, than in the time we’ve been here. And I know that has to start at the top, you know, that you wanted us to go through this period of like evaluation, seeing what could be improved, and then obviously implementation um and then results hopefully. But what what is your end goal with all of the changes that we’re seeing, some of which, you know, are publicly available and others which, you know, for proprietary reasons have to stay behind the scenes, especially on on the baseball side, but what’s kind of your end goal in moving us in that direction? Yeah, that’s a good question. There’s a lot of ways to take that, but I would say starting on the baseball side. Um, you know, a lot of the change is a function of just where we are in the competitive cycle and in Mo’s tenure, right? So, Mo expressed to us a few years ago that, you know, he’s not going to do this forever. And, um, he wants to kind of um, do it a couple more years. And as we and we were happy to have him for a couple more years. And so, we started thinking, okay, well, who’s going to be next? and we started thinking about the various ways we could do this. When we identified him as being available after his stint with the Red Sox, um we thought, well, let’s bring him in for a year to see how he likes the organization, do sort of a mutual feeling out period. And he uh really liked it. Um he was able to really think a lot about the organization and what it needed. And then obviously this year’s been that transition year where um we’ve identified him as going to take that role at the end of October and um but Mo was still still had the reigns all season and it’s pretty unusual actually. Um I don’t really know of many other situations where it’s happening. Ironically, it’s happening in St. Louis with another team. The Blues are doing that with Ste who was identified early on that he was going to be the next GM. But other than that, I don’t really know of that being very common. Regardless, we felt like it was um a pretty cool idea because first of all, Heim needed a little bit of time to acclimate to St. Louis. His family was in Scott, Boston. He he was happy with that that um interim period. And then Mo was, you know, had his time frame. And so he’s been able to really understand the organization and make changes. And that’s they’ve been very collaborative. And so the player development piece that he’s changed, some of the new hires, you mentioned, you talked to Surf um earlier in this podcast, who’s got a great vision for for player development. And um so he’s been really focused on that part of it. And so when he takes the seat, he’s going to hit the ground running. It won’t be drinking from a fire hose. He already knows people in the organization. I think it’s a really cool thing. I’m I’m hoping it it works out. But um that’s the baseball side. On the business side, um you know, where we are in the competitive cycle, having you know, been a perennial playoff team to um hovering around 500 now for a couple years, um it’s just a different situation, right? So instead of um you know uh every promotion working and causing an increment and spike in revenue and you can evaluate it really easily in a in a stable demand environment when your demand goes down a bit. Certain things work and certain things don’t work. Um and that’s what we’re learning. Um you guys know in Nook Karuna Ratne who came over from the Blue Jays. he’s um uh senior VP of business development at the or business business operations at the moment and and he was able to really help us in a few areas that he had already experienced in Toronto because they’ve been through a couple cycles when he was there and uh so I’m thankful that he’s been able to uh help us navigate some of that. Another one of the things that we decided we would need to do as part of this slightly different demand equation right at the moment is make the games feel a little bit different. Um you know at the postseason news conference last uh fall I was asked what do you say to the fans who aren’t liking this mediocre baseball? And my first answer was um well we’re working on the game day experience and I knew as soon as I said that I’m like can I reel that one back in because it probably isn’t welcome to the life of a journalist so many times I’m like oh let me just tweak how I wanted to say that probably not what they wanted to hear as far as like oh we’re going to turn up the music or we’re going to you know make the walk up songs more youthful. I mean you know people had certain visions of what that meant. Um, but my point about that is that we had already been thinking like how do we do everything that’s in our power on the business and operational side to make this a better experience for fans. Um, and so in that topic, which should be placed appropriately as not the most important thing we do here, but uh but but very important nonetheless, uh we’ve decided to kind of um make a Friday feel a little bit different than a Sunday. uh making a Tuesday night in April feel different than a Friday night in June, you know, and um and there a whole bunch of ways that we’ve been able to do that. And that’s just kind of the starting point, you know. I mean, we we’ve looked hard at our theme nights, which ones are working, which ones are kind of hoham. Well, let’s let’s be more focused on ones that work and push a little harder on those and let’s be real experimental with the things that don’t. You know, one of the things that um Anuk and I have talked about is having our game day guys and gals be not as riskaverse as they were. And what that means is like let’s take a few chances. You know, they redid the scoreboard. I heard from some fans, wait a minute, out of town scores moved. Where are they? You know, like people are sort of setting their ways. And I I am too. like we’re used to certain things and if they change it it can upset people uh you know if if we don’t do some things that that bother people and I’m not talking like major stuff but like you know let’s be experimental in the game day stuff um then we’re probably not pushing the envelope enough. Um another example of that was the music in the concourse. Should it be the game day broadcast? Should it be the radio? Should it be the TV? Or should we be cranking tunes? You know I mean I don’t know the answer. It depends on the spot. So, we’ve been experimenting a little bit of that. Gotten some negativity on I want to hear the game, you know, I don’t want to hear a song or whatever. Um, so experimenting a little bit is important. And then, um, other things on the business side, we’ve made some changes in corporate sales and in ticket sales. Um, and really working hard on our media situation with um, FanDuel Sports Network. um that whole space has been disrupted. Fans understand that I think there’s a lot of change happening. Um many of our fans couldn’t get our games for many years as the old cable mall model was was failing and everybody was cutting the cord. Well, that’s fine. You cut the cord because there all these streamers, but there was no way to stream Cardinal games. And so, a lot of people just didn’t have access to our product and we were stuck on legacy contracts that were built for a different era of media. uh the business model. And so um now we finally have a direct to consumer app that be people can pay for every month and get Cardinal baseball. We have um you know we had 10 over the air games this year which was a way to kind of get your toe back in the water of free games. Um I mean look in theory you would love for every fan to have access to every game for free. Um, but you know there’s a balance between on the one end of the scale all free to everybody with very little monetization and then nothing free and everybody pays for what they watch. That’s the extreme end of the other end of that spectrum. Full monetization but not very good reach, right? And so we’re in a hybrid situation where um we’re trying to balance those two competing dynamics as are all hockey teams, all basketball teams, all baseball team, everybody’s sort of playing this balancing act and um as we transition in the sports media industry from something that where we’ve been to where we’re headed. Um so working on that as well on the business side. To me, it seems like there’s a level of detail and care and and some of it happens behind the scenes by nature of of the business. Um, but you know, I I I really do feel that um there there is is so much going on to like move things in a certain and particular direction um like under under your guys ownership. Um and you know there’s like an evaluation process, there’s like an implementation tweaking process and then ideally a results process. So, you know, where different areas of the organization fall into, you know, in in those three particular buckets. I I definitely feel like there’s, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of tweaking being done now based on kind of what you said. It sounds like So, there’s there’s a pretty significant pipeline going between what, you know, we’re doing and then also what you’re hearing from fans. So, how how does that work? like how do you um how do you kind of keep your pulse on what the fan base is interested in and and their concerns and and what they’re expressing? Yeah, I would say um couple answers. One is we do know that our fans aren’t all similar in terms of what they’re getting out of Cardinals baseball. And so we did a a study last year and it’s sort of ongoing with ongoing surveys to segment our fan base and to understand, you know, what a family of four might want out of Cardinals baseball versus say a young professional single or you know an older um hardcore fan who might have memories of sportsman’s park or whatever. So um and and so there’s probably eight to 10 types of those categories and and it’s not to like get in fans business too much in the sense of it being like oh we know everything they’re doing. It’s more about how do you instead of having just this, you know, single way to market to fans, we’d rather create multiple ways to market to different groups of fans. And, you know, we’re we’re not quite there and being able to understand every sort of buying pattern that somebody might have and therefore what they might want to buy tomorrow, but we’re getting a little bit closer to that. Um, and we all sense it with our social media and our Amazon and they’re marketing things to you that you realize you’ve been either talking about or thinking about or god knows what. But we’re not at that level of creepiness um by any stretch. But uh we do want to understand what our fan wants and and because we can offer different experiences and so that’s a piece of it. The other thing on the business side that you sort of alluded to was um kind of this push for either modernization or however you want to call it, but you know, everybody knows about these analytics departments on the baseball side. Every team now has, you know, 10 to 30 analysts um crunching numbers in a way of looking at the there’s just so much data out there. Well, there’s a lot of data on the business side, too. And we’ve gone from, you know, kind of one person keeping an eye on some things to um now we’ve got five business analysts and um they’re helping us uh really be almost like a service provider to the other departments. If somebody in stadium operations has a particular problem that maybe they don’t have the infrastructure to solve that might be data driven or fan survey based. They want to get feedback. Business analytics team, you know, if our sponsorship group um wants to understand, you know, and build a rate card for things that um you know, take a bunch of historical data about the value of our sponsorship uh assets. Um you know, go to the business analytics team, help them with that project. I’m just giving two examples, but there’s tons of them. So building out that uh function in the in the company is sort of a um has been a priority recently. And that might be a little bit to your point of like you’ve noticed a little bit more of a push for um like datadriven approaches to solving some problems and um I would call it a modern sort of progressive business approach to um some of the things that that we’re dealing with in what is arguably a mature business. And we’ve been here 140 years. So always learning though. That’s pretty sure. But the business has changed. I mean there’s so much innovation happening. There’s a a whole ecosystem of sports uh small incubator startups that are selling anything from performance wearable technology for players to you know uh you know ticketing systems to you know other technology ideas built for uh the sports ecosystem. So, um, there’s sort of a lot to to think about in terms of staying on the front end of the innovation curve in sports. And the these teams and these leagues have all seen an influx of really professionally managed teams on both the business and the baseball side. When we first started 30 years ago, I mean, there was a few teams that were sort of pushing the envelope on the the baseball uh side of things and then even fewer on the business side. And I’d like to think that we were on the front end of that curve for most of that time and now we feel like a lot of teams have really caught up to us and we got to figure out a way to step take two steps forward and be ahead of the curve again. You know, the last couple years for a lot of us, for all of us, we’re not used to empty seats. We’re not used to too many tallies in the lost column. And I think that everything we’ve been talking about here really is kind of the response and feeds into this question of there’s a lot of intentionality about the environment we’re creating. But I just wonder for you as a person who’s been around for the entire time your family’s been involved, been the president for a good chunk of that, you know, what’s it been like, I guess, to kind of weather the storm of 23, 24, 25 when life happens. It doesn’t always go the way we want. Um but just on a personal level, you know, what’s it it been like for you to kind of deal with the valley here between what we know will be some peaks? Yeah. Um I it’s been tough. It’s been tough because it’s not like you um you know, it’s just like a month of this or a month. I mean, we’re talking about, you know, these cycles are long. Um and um our winning cycle was super long, which was great. Um, but now we’re in a few year period where like you said it hasn’t been the playoff appearances and the deep October runs and um it I mean it’s like last night it was a really sort of our first cool night uh of the summer and I was thinking in my head like this feels like a playoff game and yet you know we didn’t have the playoff crowd and it was a little bit like I I was feeling a little nostalgic for that feeling of when the air is a little crisp and you’re just desperate for a win in a in a playoff game and that like excitement and what could happen and the sky’s is the limit. I miss that, you know, and I also think that being in it for this long gives you a certain amount of perspective because um if you just like started and this was the kind of approach you were getting from fan feedback and from the media and everything else, you’d go, why does anybody want to do this? you know, cuz it’s like, you know, there are a lot of pot shots and things like that. And I try not to focus on that. Again, control the things you can’t control and let the other stuff just happen. But I think it’s smart to have your pulse on what generally the trends are with what fans are thinking, what they’re saying, what social media’s uh in aggregate saying you need to do or should do. And um so I don’t mean to say we just, you know, put our hands over our ears, but um having been in it this long, it does give you some perspective knowing that if you can turn this thing around, um you know, you’ll just never dwell on the this the years that weren’t so great, right? It’s kind of like the old baseball scout adage of a guy, you know, hits a home run and then the next at bat he strikes out, punches out looking and they say, “Well, it’s in there. Like, we know he can do it.” And I mean, I feel like we know that about our fan base. We know that about that about or pardon me, we know that about this environment. I mean, it’s it’s in there. It is a great baseball fanship. It is a great place to see a game and the down parts of the cycle are what they are and they are hard and um but there is a lot of cool things turnurning behind the scenes like we’ve talked about. And I think that it’s got to be exciting too to think that way. Like you mentioned, thinking about longing for that playoff atmosphere to say that’s going to be really cool. Not that anyone ever took it for granted, but coming out the other side, like that’s going to feel very rewarding, I would think. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It we knew when we were doing it almost every year that it wasn’t getting old and that, you know, it may not last forever, but um when we get back there, um it’ll be that much sweeter. And I’ve said this to a few people um you know when we’ve done some things like at the trade deadline where you’re selling instead of buying um when we come out on the other side of this and we we have a team that can compete for a title. Um it won’t be in spite of what we went through. It’ll be because of it really because you know when you think about um just look at our two top prospects you know um from the draft that we just had. weather halt. I mean, these are top picks. You don’t get the top picks um when you’re finishing first. Um and so it’s not purely formulaic. And we know that when you’re winning, you can also still have a good farm system. You know, in I think it was 2012, we had a World Series team and a number one farm system. So, like to your point, we know this can be done, right? Um it’s harder. there’s more people chasing it in a very professional and organized and systematic way. Um, but it can be done and we plan on getting it done. Well, it’s been great to have you down here uh with us and just kind of talking things over. Um, we appreciate you making the time and and connecting with the fans in this way. Certainly meaningful to uh them, I’m sure. And we appreciate you making the time to talk with us. Thank you guys. I know our fans love all the content you guys create that shows them behind the scenes and um um it it’s much appreciated from us because we even learn some stuff when we see what you guys are doing and uh breaking news as a team owner. I feel like I can retire now like a reach my life goal and then I can only imagine fans getting that full behind the scenes thing. So thank you guys. Absolutely. If you want to check out any of those other previous episodes that we’ve talked about, uh, Rob Surfolio or John Mosa recently or any of the future episodes, be sure to subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. For Elizabeth and Bill, I’m Brett. We’ll talk to you next time on the Cardinals Insider podcast.

Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III joins the show to discuss the front office environment, his desire to see post season games in St. Louis again, how he approached the design of the current Busch Stadium, what it’s been like to navigate the club’s challenges in recent years, and much more.