The professional baseball team of St. Louis, Missouri, the Cardinals, wrapped up its 2025 baseball campaign on Sunday sporting a mediocre record of 78 wins and 84 losses, falling just shy of a playoff spot. This is the club’s third straight year missing the playoffs, and adds yet another year of their streak of subpar performance since 2022. The recent seasons filled with disappointing results have had a detrimental impact on fan attendance, posting significantly worse numbers this season for a franchise that was once considered to be one of the best baseball cities in the world. The disheartening attendance statistics are emphasized by a recent article from the St. Louis Post Dispatch:
“The Cardinals finished 2025 with an average attendance of 27,778 tickets sold per game, continuing a two-season decline. […] After decades spent as a perennial top-10 attendance franchise, St. Louis will finish in the bottom half of teams in attendance for the first time since 1980.”
For decades, the home of the Cardinals, Busch Stadium, has always been able to fill its seats, even from 2016 to 2018 when they had a three year playoff drought similar to this one. Through thick and thin, the support of Cardinals fans has seemed unwavering, so what makes this year different? Many feel as though managerial efforts have been subpar, reinforced by the end of former General Manager John Mozeliak’s tenure with the Cardinals after nearly two decades of employment, many fans are done being content with owners who are disinterested in success. An article by Yahoo! Sports delivers the main perpetrator of the attendance slump:
“The on-field play, while just mediocre, lacks any meaning. There isn’t a prominent prospect of a superstar playing every day, and with major changes coming in the offseason, it’s hard to get invested in this team […] It’s an even more disappointing end to Mozeliak’s tenure with the Cardinals. He helped construct some legendary teams, but, in his final year, the product on the field wasn’t inspiring, bringing in the least amount of fans seen in 30 years.”
The shift in Cardinals baseball over the past several years from yearly playoff competitor to mediocre postseason longshot has been gradual, but this year has been the starkest example of the Cardinals’ decline. The attendance average was still respectable and in the top 10 of the league during 2023 and 2024, both years when the Cardinals missed the playoffs with roughly the same amount of wins as this year. However, this year even the diehard fans have lost interest in the franchise and are sick of waiting for a comeback. Jerome Mayer, a lifelong Cardinals fan for decades, speaks on what makes this year different:
“Whether or not they’re deserving, I don’t know, but I think it’s the only method the fans have of letting the ownership know what they think. If they don’t show up, they don’t make as much money, and really, all ownership really cares about… they want to win, but I think the bottom line is still money, it’s a business. […] If they see their revenues are going down every year, they have to start saying, well, why is that? Well, it’s because we’re not winning. Well, then we’d better start winning.”
The fans that have been dubbed “The Best Fans in all of Baseball” for decades are voicing their discontent, and they want to see change and to return to setting the standard for the rest of the league. With the end of John Mozeliak’s tenure and the start of new General Manager Chaim Bloom’s, the fans have several areas they want the new management to focus on. Bryce Mullen, a junior at Westminster and an involved, loyal fan of the Cardinals, speaks on what he wants to be prioritized for the years ahead:
“I feel like they need to choose a stance, whether they’re going full rebuild and they’re going to get their young guys rolling and get the value for them, or they’re actually going to spend some money and go get somebody, some good guys for that young talent. They’ve been afraid to spend the money and they need to or make a trade, they’re afraid of risking it. That’s another thing, they’ve been really bad at pitching development. You’ve got guys like Jojo Romero who was really good for the most part, and then Ryan Helsley and he is out now. I feel like a lot of it is just setting the standard.”
Chaim Bloom’s plans to fulfill the desires of the fans in the years to come, focusing on building around the young core of players that has the potential to return to the glory of the club’s past.
