One of the league’s favorites at the start of the 2025 Major League Baseball season was the St. Louis Cardinals.
After an obviously strange summer, there were essentially no expectations for St. Louis, yet the team came out of the gates strong. For most of the first half of the season, St. Louis seemed to be a playoff club and was consistently well above.500. However, things went south, and the Cardinals traded seven players before the trade deadline, dropping their record to 61-64.
A major decline in attendance has been a recurring theme throughout the season, even when the Cardinals were winning handily. Attending a Cardinals home game now will undoubtedly show that, but that was true even in the early going when St. Louis appeared to be a postseason contender. As the Cardinals’ supremacy in the National League has come to an end, this pattern has been more prevalent in recent years. The Cardinals haven’t made any significant expenditures, and as a result, supporters have stopped going.
How will Cardinals respond to recent fan outcry?
In a conversation with Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Vice President for Ticket Sales Joe Strohm recognized this fact on behalf of the team.
Strohm told Goold, “There is work — there is work there to be done, because at the end of the day, it’s not where we want to be.” “That’s the one thing: We know there is effort being done to lure people back, and fans have the right to express their happiness or discontent. We must regain their trust. The entertainment business is that. Earning people’s discretionary cash is essential.
“It’s one of those where if you’ve got a person who says, ‘I want to see what the team does before I make my decision,’ then it’s like it was before. You can wait until January. If you want to pay early and get a discount, that’s there for you as well.”
The atmosphere at the ballpark has obviously changed in recent years. The Cardinals have sold before the trade deadline in two of the last three seasons. That has undoubtedly been the case for a very long time. When Chaim Bloom becomes president of baseball operations, he will have the difficult job of guiding the organization out of its current predicament.
