2024 St. Louis Schedule

Given the prices of beer, hotdogs, t-shirts, etc., declining attendance will impact revenue significantly, even if ticket sales don’t drop off until next year’s batch of season tickets go on sale.

I feel like a broken record, but next week, the team with the best record in the American League, the Baltimore Orioles, are coming in. Tickets are being made available as low as $5 each and Field Box seats at $15!

https://www.mlb.com/cardinals/tickets/specials/metro

The stadium looked quite empty. I wish they still counted the turnstyle ticks to show attended versus tickets sold. They are missing out on a lot of revenue from concessions and other at the ballpark sales.

The only thing the fans can do to show their displeasure is to vote with their wallet and not go to games. It certainly sounds like it has gotten Dewitt’s attention, but I don’t know if it will have the intended effect. Dewitt will likely just cut costs further since the revenue was lower rather than spending more in hopes of having a quality team. The is the approach the A’s took and then blamed the fans.

Maybe if anything it will convince the team to be sellers at the deadline if they aren’t well over .500. They will get savings in trades of the vets for the remainder of the year. I actually think the best thing for this team in 25 and beyond is to sell the players in my other threads likely and maybe categories. We need a retool to build up on young quality players (also they are cheaper for Dewitt). We have some good young pieces to build around, so we don’t need a complete teardown and rebuild.

All things come to an end. DeWitt had a pretty good run but the last 8-9 years have been pretty average to now the last two being below average. We need a new owner / ownership group that has a passion for Cardinal baseball.

Oh sure, if DeWitt remains in place the Cardinals will probably make the playoffs more years that they don’t (although they missed in ’16, ’17, ’18, made in ’19, ’20, ’21, and ’22 then missed and fell way off in ’23 so that’s making the playoffs 4 of the last 8 with the only notable appearance being ’19 when they made in to the NLCS and got swept away). It remains to be seen how ’24 turns out but making the playoffs as the 3rd WC probably won’t move the needle with most of our fanbase.

The truth is that 2014 was the last time the Cardinals put a good team in the playoffs. Yeah, the 2015 team won 100 games but they did the bulk of their damage that year before the all-star break and were a shell of themselves by the end of the season. The Cubs destroyed that team 4-1 in the 2015 division round.

This year marks an entire decade of pretty ‘meh’ baseball in Saint Louis with the last two being way below StL’s historical standards.

We are definitely trending towards the dreaded doom loop. Less tickets sold = less revenue = payroll cuts = less margin of error = greater reliance on a farm system which isn’t producing above average players.

I try not to get caught up in hysterics or being a pessimist just for kicks but the reality is that our near term future is really not that bright.

I don’t at all need a count of turnstile clicks to get a reasonably accurate read of genuine attendance for the simple reason that I attended countless games in the 70’s with attendance being in the 7,500 to 10,000 range. I know precisely what that sort of gate looks like.

I’m pretty sure Mo and Bill thought “competitive” would be good enough.