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So what’s with the St. Louis media feeling the need to carry Mo’s water? Are they afraid they’re gonna get banned from the clubhouse post- and pre-game?
Take for instance Derrick Goold’s insistence that the decrease in attendance is due to heat and school. Even when fans pushed back on this notion with evidence that showed it was false when the Cards were winning, he keeps insisting that it’s because of heat and school plus performance. NO, DG, the lack of attendance is all about the performance.
Granted I missed Monday night's game at Busch Stadium, but I'd be interested if the #stlcards had more fans at the games over the weekend at Target Field in Minnesota than they have tonight in St. Louis.
Loud STL cheers there.
Here? Heat. School. Standings. A sparse crowd.
— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) August 28, 2024
This P-D headline implies the heat was the reason the crowd was a record low. After all, it has never before been hot in StL in August. Perhaps they can’t spell a-p-a-t-h-y…
“Record low crowd beats the heat for a 4-1 Cardinals victory over San Diego”
This is at the National Anthem.
I attended games in the ‘70s as a teenager, and it was hot and humid then. So the only way that excuse holds water (so to speak) is if attendance falls every August.
I’ve been to quite a few games that were attended by crowds of somewhere near 10K-12K. I seem to recall most of them were when the weather was chilly and damp. But they were always during a time when the Redbirds were buried in the standings.
It’s not just the St. Louis media that’s in a funk…….the national media is mired in an absolutely miserable slump.
I went to Athletic games in 1967 the year before Finley moved them to Oakland. They were 62-99. Horrible old stadium. They had more fans in attendence than the Cardinals do right now.
Yes the Cardinals have not been really good in almost a decade, yes it’s hot, yes yesterday was a day game.
Another huge factor is the two years of double digit inflation we had in 2021 and 2022.
We have all felt it. It seems like the price of everything went up 50%
The service industry is the worst (look at what happened to restaurant and hotel prices) and American tipping culture is so far out of hand it’s disgusting. 25% is what’s expected these days.
The Cardinals have always been a regional draw meaning that attendance depends rather heavily on folks coming into town – especially for weekend series.
Well, the weekend trips are just not doable for many folks anymore. I contend that even if the Cardinals were winning big there would still have been a small but noticable decline.
I’ve seen the rise and fall of Union Station and Laclede’s Landing from the early 8Os through the early 2000s is when I was in the habit of making 2 to 4 weekend trips to see the Cards play.
Increased crime or even the perception of increased crime is another small but contributing factor.
If the team is winning more people will not let pricing and heat prevent a trip to the ballpark. When the team is scuffling any excuse will do….
I really don’t get the fascination everyone here has with attendance. Who gives a rip. I had to unfollow Goold for the same reason. It’s an obsession.
Many have suggested that change will be revenue driven. We all want change, but we cannot see the balance sheet, so we have to look at what we can see. That is the reason for the fascination with attendance.
The reason I care about attendance trends is that ownership has stated a direct correlation between it and player spending. We’ve talked a lot about the downward spiral that can result. Lower revenues mean lower payroll, which leads to poorer results, which leads to lower revenues, etc.
The current trajectory has to be changed, but it won’t without a significant intervention. Simple adjustments won’t do it. The driver of change is almost certainly going to be financial, not baseball-related, especially since a .500 team is “still in the wild card race”.
To reuse a Girsch phrase from better days, they may be getting close to their “puke point”. Fan apathy is helping drive this expected change.
Exactly. It BDW uses the fan apathy as a reason to invest in the team to get fans excited about following a real winner again, that’s great. Alternatively, he very well could tighten the belt further, which will leave the team ill prepared to be competitive in a division where the Brewers aren’t going anywhere and the other three teams have better or at least comparable farm systems and young talent. It’s a big deal that no one is showing up.
Jeff Gordon and Ben Frederickson of the P-D do a weekly podcast. In the most recent one Gordon actually said with a straight face that the Cardinals needed to consider building a retractable roof at some point to help attendance. Good grief I don’t even know what to say to that.
Anyway, for years now it has been said that if Cardinal fans wanted to get the attention of ownership they should stop going to games instead of just mouthing off on social media. Well do we have the attention of ownership now?
There is certainly a longer term correlation between attendance/revenue and player spending, but ownership has the causality precisely backward, and I think they cynically know it. Further, they are confounding quantity demand (at a given/current level of product quality) with the shape of the market’s overall demand curve–i.e., the revenue potential of this franchise when properly run is well-documented.
I wonder how STLFC attendance is this year? I don’t have a correlation to them showing up in 2023 and if any of those games fall on weekend. City 2 is a decent draw for nextpro. Could the regions dollars be spread too thin?
Nah is the results in the standing that is a pretty big factor. Everyone knows that the attendance dips at the end of August and in April and May is a pretty tough sell for families. Parents are a lot less loose these days as far as activities where my parents would take me to games and we’d get home at 12:30-1 am and it was back up for school at 630.
I don’t like going when its too cold or hot or a chance of rain. Unfortunately we get a rainbow of weather patterns around this region. I’ve even cancelled trips to Peoria to see the chiefs play due to the threat of weather. I live about 70 minutes from Peoria and about 90 minutes from downtown depending on how fast I drive. I think those are the good majority that they’ve lost recently. The fans that travel long way. I think at one point they did a survey and it was a good portion of the fanbase traveled more than 2 hours to see a game.
Pads does not care about attendance, but it is a big factor in the financial health and stability of many teams. And it is a huge story in St. Louis this year due to the drastic reduction of people showing up at the park.
Great points made about economic factors and their part in making it tougher for many.
On a broader note, MLB needs to get to some sort of media revenue sharing plan. This situation with teams like Miami and this year the White Sox being horrible, while the Dodgers commit $700M to one guy is ridiculous. Although I will say, Ohtani is probably worth that kind of money – he is a once-in-a-generation talent.
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