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\u2018Super Fan Jan\u2019 with Fredbird the mascot. (Daniels Family\/Jeff Bloodworth)<\/p>\nIn St. Louis, baseball has always been serious. But for Jan Daniels, it\u2019s practically divine. \u201cOpening Day,\u201d says the 88 year old, her eyes beaming, \u201cIs a Holy Day of Obligation. You don\u2019t miss it!\u201d Beginning in 1958, \u201cSuper Fan Jan\u201d has attended 69 consecutive St. Louis Cardinals home openers. The first 60 were with Dan, her late husband. Today, she makes the pilgrimage with Stephen, her son, and he\u2019s as devout as his mother. As the middle-aged cancer survivor explains, the Cardinals, alongside a splash of Jan\u2019s holy water, may even have saved his life. \u201cI always think,\u201d he says of his time in the bleachers, \u201cthat it could have been one of the reasons I made it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not everyone here sees the game as literally miraculous. But it\u2019s hard not to feel that Opening Day in St. Louis is life-giving, the crack of batted ball the moment spring\u2019s green shoots defeat the prairie chill. This year, over 100,000 are here to party. And why not? The St. Louis Cardinals are the bishops of baseball, with a near-mystical relationship with their fans. \u201cYou\u2019re going back to the late 1800s, handed down to generations of fans,\u201d explains Tom Ackerman, program director at KMOX, a local radio super-station that\u2019s broadcast Cardinals games for a century. \u201cIf you grow up in a Cardinal\u2019s family that\u2019s what you know. The loyalty goes back through the generations, the history, the success of the franchise.\u201d<\/p>\n
And what success: with 11 World Series, the Cardinals are historically one of elite franchises across American sport. Technically, too, the team is impressive. Embracing what\u2019s known as the \u201cCardinal Way\u201d \u2014 a robust training style involving crisp defense, speed on the basepaths, and putting savvy play over big payrolls \u2014 the team is equally famed for its sportsmanship. As Jan Daniels says, former players returning in different jerseys will always get applauded if they play well. \u201cWhenever there\u2019s a good play from the other team that deserves a hand, we do that. That\u2019s what the St. Louis fans do, we just like good ball playing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Super Fan Jan\u2019 with Fredbird the mascot. (Daniels Family\/Jeff Bloodworth)<\/p>\n
Yet if fans love vibes and a winner, the Cardinals are ultimately so beloved thanks to KMOX: a 50,000-watt mega-station that broadcasts games to over a dozen states. Because of St. Louis\u2019s prime location in America\u2019s heartland, some 700 miles from the sea, it gathers in supporters from right across the south and Midwest. For 71 years to 2021, a series of radio icons called the Cardinals\u2019 games. Sure, on TV, the graphics and images tell the story. But on radio, the announcers can paint a picture in prose. Phrases like Jack Buck\u2019s\u00a0iconic<\/a>\u00a0\u201cThat\u2019s a Winner!\u201d now serve as city-wide maxims. For three quarters of a century, these greats were the sound of the summer. They were more than broadcasters; the intimacy of radio made them friends; their warmth and talent made them family.<\/p>\n To that extent, then, Opening Day is a city-wide family reunion. \u201cThey\u2019re our glue, the glue of the city,\u201d says Al Crenshaw. 34 years old with a broad smile, he\u2019s hanging out with some pals, tailgating as it\u2019s known in America, standing by a grill of smoking meat and holding a can of Budweiser, St. Louis\u2019s hometown beer. \u201cThey are our glue, the glue to the city,\u201d Crenshaw adds of his team. \u201cYou can\u2019t think of St. Louis without thinking of the Cardinals first.\u201d<\/p>\n Fair enough. Yet amid the joys of Opening Day, you don\u2019t really get the sense that St. Louis\u2019s communal spirit survives the rest of the year. \u201cThat\u2019s part of our problem as a region,\u201d says Tony Messenger, a veteran local journalist. \u201cWe aren\u2019t literally invested in the success of downtown St. Louis. And if we were, Opening Day would be more meaningful.\u201d Separated by city and county, middle-class suburbanites adore the St. Louis Cardinals. But their tax dollars do not pay for the streets abutting the team\u2019s stadium, nor for derelict city schools. United on Opening Day, St. Louis is divided on most others.<\/p>\n \u00a0Around the turn of the century, some 60% of St. Louis residents were immigrants or their children. Many found work in the city\u2019s famous breweries\u00a0\u2014 both Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch, the latter\u00a0giving<\/a>\u00a0the Cardinal\u2019s stadium its name.\u00a0Home also to the nation\u2019s\u00a0eighth-largest<\/a> African-American urban population, St. Louis soon became a hodgepodge of ethnic enclaves. The Hill, a neighborhood famed for its migrants from the Lombard plains, was typical. Amid this diversity, the Cardinals were the city\u2019s social glue. For an immigrant kid whose parents spoke with an accent, donning a red hat meant near-instant assimilation. The baseball diamond is where two Hall of Fame baseballers, the Hill\u2019s Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola, shed their ethnic origins and became plain-spoken Middle Americans.<\/p>\n All the while, the city boomed. As late as 1975, St. Louis hosted eight\u00a0Fortune 500<\/a> corporate firms. Aerospace, cars, biotechnology, food \u2014 all these, alongside beer, fueled the local economy. Corporate execs enjoyed cushy expense accounts; organized labor gave workers security. Even now, this wealth can be seen on the city\u2019s streets. Think, here, of the \u201cpainted ladies\u201d of Lafayette Square \u2014 their iron balconies and double-sloped mansard roofs evoking the city\u2019s 18th-century French founding \u2014 or else the Siamese-Byzantine beauty of the Fabulous Fox Theatre. Then, of course, there\u2019s the Gateway Arch, 630 feet high and a symbol of the city since 1965.<\/p>\n Yet as so often in Middle America, the good times wouldn\u2019t last. From the Sixties, residents started fleeing the urban core for the suburbs. Crime, urban riots, and integrated schools drove them out; cars and interstates made the exodus easy. That was bad news for the institutions that drove St. Louis\u2019s economic growth: the universities, the corporate headquarters, and, indeed, the Cardinal\u2019s downtown stadium. Mirroring the city\u2019s wider decline, attendance rates collapsed through the Seventies, even as the team itself stopped winning.<\/p>\n \u201cAs so often in Middle America, the good times wouldn\u2019t last\u201d<\/p>\n In some ways, things are even worse today. In 1950, roughly a million people lived in St. Louis. Now, there are barely a quarter, with white-collar workers, alongside their tax dollars, fleeing to ever-more distant exurbs. For Messenger, indeed, the city\u2019s vast scale is part of the problem. Bestriding the mighty Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, Greater St. Louis is an 8,500-square-mile region that spans 15 counties and, in Illinois and Missouri, two states. Yet if that means the central core has long struggled with money \u2014 residents can easily commute to jobs far away \u2014 St. Louis also has to contend with the shadow of its hyper-local, polyglot history. \u201cWhere did you go to high school\u201d, the city\u2019s\u00a0standard<\/a> icebreaker, is a remnant of a past when neighborhood was a core marker of identity. But that hardly chimes with a place where whole districts are ghost towns. As Messenger puts it, St. Louis has the \u201cbones\u201d of a big city, but without enough people to fill it.<\/p>\n And if that causes a host of downstream problems \u2014 city schools are only \u201cprovisionally\u201d accredited; the state recently assumed control over the police department \u2014 none feel as pressing as crime. Messenger says it permeates every discussion of the city, and with\u00a0139 murders<\/a> a year, it\u2019s not hard to see why. This brutal reality is impossible to separate from the question of race, itself, in a sense, the unfortunate flipside to the city\u2019s central location. If, after all, the Cardinals boasts fans from right across the country, St. Louis also blends the post-industrial black ghettos of the Midwest with the sharper racial legacy of the South.<\/p>\n Practicing a semi-official form of Jim Crow, with schools and hospitals segregated until the Sixties, the 2014 Ferguson Riots suggest that the city\u2019s wounds are far from healed. And if the proportion of black people murdered in Missouri is the highest<\/a>\u00a0in the nation, that\u2019s shadowed by less vicious but no-less disruptive crime. During Covid, teens\u00a0staged<\/a>\u00a0\u201cstreet takeovers\u201d where drivers performed dangerous stunts, while onlookers tossed fireworks and even mobbed police cars. Dr Mike Tsichlis, a St. Louis native who studies the city\u2019s history, laments. If things continue, he worries, \u201cthe city itself will not be a viable sustainable place for living.\u201d That\u2019s a far cry from lily-white suburbs like\u00a0Ladue<\/a>, where donors put gold-plated nameplates on school water fountains. Meanwhile, the black kids in 30 city\u00a0schools<\/a>\u00a0go thirsty from shut water fountains fed by lead pipes.<\/p>\n And though crime has now returned to pre-Covid levels, Messenger concedes that the \u201ccrime narrative\u201d drives residents from the city \u2014 or, decades after the mafia\u00a0bombings or garden-variety\u00a0street robberies<\/a>\u00a0of the Seventies, from attending a Cardinals game. Go to any drinking hole in Greater St. Louis, the journalist guarantees, and you\u2019ll find \u201can old white guy\u201d saying \u201c\u2018I gave up my ticket, so I\u2019m not going down there.\u2019\u201d Such sentiments are based on headline-grabbing incidents. In 2025, for instance, a visiting kid from Tennessee lost both his legs when an unlicensed St. Louis teenager, out on bail for robbery,\u00a0sped through<\/a>\u00a0a yield sign and caused a major crash.<\/p>\n Not that everything\u2019s hopeless. The Cardinals, Messenger argues, are dealing with the city\u2019s crime-soaked \u201cnarrative\u201d \u2014 a narrative he thinks they can beat. Well, maybe it was Super Fan Jan leading the cheers of a sellout crowd. Or perhaps it was \u201cDon\u2019t Stop Believing\u201d blaring through Downtown. It could also have been the Budweiser Clydesdales, a team of eight draft horses pulling a red, white, and gold beer wagon\u00a0around<\/a>\u00a0the pre-game field.\u00a0But, whatever the reason, on this Opening Day, St. Louis beat the narrative. Down 7-1 in the sixth inning, the Cardinals came roaring back for a 9-7 win. The St. Louis family erupted.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a joy Daniels knows from her 60th and final Opening Day with her husband Dan. On that 2017 day, they were celebrated on the stadium Jumbotron. Fans roared for the couple and their six-decade streak. Leaving the stadium after the game, the 85-year-old Dan Daniels struggled to walk. He panicked. Yet at this moment of fright and anxiety, the Cardinal Way intervened. Dan, with his walker, and Jan, carrying two-dozen roses, were easy to spot. So just as a terrified Daniels shuffled his way through the crowd, his son Daniels recalls, \u201cyou hear this clapping, and then another person\u2019s clapping, and another person. And the sea of red parted. And all the people lined up to one side and started clapping.\u201d In the center of this parted sea were Jan and Dan, who walked back to their car past lines of cheering fans. \u201cAnd as we get to the end,\u201d Stephen recalls, \u201cthese girls came up and said, \u2018thank you, you gave us something to believe in\u2019.\u201d They\u2019re not alone there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In St. Louis, baseball has always been serious. But for Jan Daniels, it\u2019s practically divine. \u201cOpening Day,\u201d says…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2403],"tags":[5,160,84600,33167,4,302,673,67,4311,4310],"class_list":{"0":"post-663599","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-st-louis-cardinals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-cardinals","10":"tag-deindustrialisation","11":"tag-midwest","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-sport","14":"tag-st-louis","15":"tag-st-louis-cardinals","16":"tag-stlouis","17":"tag-stlouiscardinals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116349000241419820","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-2262517931.jpg\")
Like the famous Gateway Arch, hints of St. Louis\u2019s rich history survive. (Ernst Haas\/Getty)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-453508532-e1775127780251.jpg\")
Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, was hit by violent riots in 2014. (Scott Olson\/Getty)<\/p>\n