As hopelessly addicted to watching sports as I am, I can sometimes overlook the fact that there are thousands of people in St. Louis and the St. Louis area that do not care about sports or the local sports teams in particular. There are some exhausting types who might ask if there is a sportsball going on during the event that they will eventually call the Superb Owl (get it? Like the animal? Why aren’t you paying attention to me?), but many multiples more are simply apathetic–they aren’t rooting against the St. Louis Cardinals, Blues, City SC, or the BattleHawks and would, all other things being equal, prefer they succeed because it will make people they know happy, but it simply isn’t on their radar. And they love it here.

If I had to score St. Louis on an objective scale, I would rank it somewhere between the poles on which large swaths of people evaluate it, which may be an easier call to make for St. Louis than any other semi-major city. The American left tends to view places through a divide of red states and blue states (when Barack Obama questioned this binary in a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, it was treated as such a revelatory point that the next time he spoke there, he was their presidential nominee), and for the last six presidential election cycles, the state in which St. Louis sits has voted against their wishes. The American right tends to view places through a divide of urban and rural, and while St. Louis would almost certainly gain their support over the much-maligned (but also great except for their baseball and hockey teams!) Chicago, it is still perceived as a location infested with crime and corruption. And for those who still have the ability to view things through a lens other than partisan politics, it is still a city with relatively minor cultural imprint outside of its professional sports teams.

But St. Louis, outside of sports, is still great. A few weeks ago, I recorded a podcast in which my co-host and I discussed our favorite things about St. Louis, and despite barely tapping into sports, it went so long that what started out as a preamble turned into a full episode. As much as I love the sports teams in St. Louis, I outright reject the version of provincialism that gravitates entirely around the success of teams comprised almost exclusively of people who are not from St. Louis and will not live in St. Louis once their playing careers have concluded.

That said, it would be disingenuous to pretend that there is not a strong emotional attachment between St. Louis and its teams–it is a connection which exists in every city, often in equal measure but rarely if ever exceeding the relationship in the Gateway City. And the owners of St. Louis sports teams know this. They use that bond to advertise attending games not as merely a fun recreational activity but as an act of civic service that just so happens to enrich them. But they also use that bond as leverage.

When the current ownership group of the St. Louis Cardinals, led by Bill DeWitt Jr., bought the St. Louis Cardinals in 1995, they paid $150 million. Per Forbes, the franchise as of March 2024 had an estimated value of $2.55 billion. Setting aside for a moment year-over-year profits (which are plentiful!), this investment has increased in total size by $82,758,620.69 per year. Sports franchises are generally profitable, but the thing that truly makes team ownership a risk-free investment is the appreciation in value of the franchise.

Bill DeWitt Jr., Bill DeWitt III, and those with smaller stakes in the St. Louis Cardinals often go out of their way to present the Cardinals not as a business operation but rather as a public trust. The DeWitts aren’t quite recluses, but while they make intermittent appearances for big or exciting press conferences, they are perfectly content to sidestep plenty of criticism that could be rightfully levied towards them (there is a reason that John Mozeliak, whose tenure as St. Louis Cardinals general manager and/or president of baseball operations has certainly been flawed, received boos on Opening Day, while neither DeWitt, whose budgetary constraints were the primary cause of what was widely viewed as an underwhelming 2023-24 off-season, did). But ultimately, if the DeWitt family were to sell the Cardinals, a thing about which I would be somewhat apathetic because it’s not as though they are even close to the worst that Major League Baseball ownership groups have to offer, it wouldn’t be St. Louis pocketing their profits. It wouldn’t even be St. Louis as the exclusive beneficiary of whatever trickle-down effect would be presented, as Bill DeWitt Jr. lives in suburban Cincinnati.

There is only one publicly owned team in major North American professional sports, the Green Bay Packers, and their ownership agreement only continues to exist thanks to a grandfather clause which allows them to subvert a National Football League rule that each team must include an owner with no fewer than 30% of a team. And despite the occasional flight of fancy suggesting municipal ownership of the Cardinals (Chase Woodruff of the former team blog Double Birds wrote a great post about this some years ago, but it appears to be lost to the internet, otherwise I would have included a link), just about the best thing a fan base can reasonably hope from ownership is that their favorite team gets purchased by a weird, morally dubious guy or guys (Steve Cohen or any of the various sovereign wealth funds that own major European soccer teams, respectively) who wants to dump a bunch of money into their team and doesn’t care about short-term profits (though they would likely make the money back upon re-sale).

The DeWitt group is hardly the worst-case scenario for a fan–the Cardinals did, after all, just conclude a series against the Oakland Athletics. But they do tend to adopt the same unpleasant posturing of most team owners. As reported earlier today by the Riverfront Times, the Cardinals may soon be seeking public financing of either a new baseball stadium or a major refurbishment of the current one. And while the report presents far more conjecture than tangible plans, it is enough to alarm St. Louisans. Given the city and the region’s experience with stadium politics, it’s easy to understand why.

While the current ownership group initially espoused the virtues of the previous Busch Stadium, particularly with the imminent switch from a hard turf playing surface to natural grass which would give the stadium more vibrancy than the era’s other cookie-cutter multi-purpose stadia, they changed their tune shortly after. In 1997, Cardinals lobbyist Tom McCarthy, as quoted in the RFT piece, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that it was the public rather than the team itself that is more capable of handling stadium financing. The team threatened that payroll would suffer and ticket prices would increase, the latter a classic scare tactic by teams when they do not want to spend money (this is a common refrain to critique player salaries). The team threatened that the team would have to relocate, not to a different market but away from downtown St. Louis to the suburbs. Bill DeWitt Jr. claimed that a new downtown park would revitalize downtown. And while the Cardinals organization would gladly claim to anybody who would listen that the current Busch Stadium, which is not yet old enough to drink the namesake beer of the family after which it is named, was privately funded, St. Louis passed tax abatements and funneled public construction projects to cater towards the park.

In relative terms, it wasn’t a horrible deal for St. Louis–many clubs have twisted the knife further to extort more funding. And while economists almost universally (I say “almost” because some economists are hired by teams) condemn public financing of stadiums as a terrible deal for taxpayers, it is reasonable to say that a new ballpark, which almost always drives more foot traffic to the city, does provide some benefit setting aside the costs, not to mention that there is some intangible benefit to being able to declare one’s self a resident of a Major League city. But it was inevitable that this wasn’t going to placate ownership, not because the current Busch Stadium, the fourth used by St. Louis since the opening of Wrigley Field in Chicago, is by any means obsolete or even remotely antiquated, but because newer is better and teams don’t say no to free money.

Bill DeWitt Jr. promised a revitalization of downtown St. Louis. But the flaw of this common promise is that the vast majority of revenue generated by the stadium is not organically new but rather a redistribution of other entertainment spending. And in the case of the current Busch Stadium project, it was redistribution from local, smaller bars and restaurants to the team-owned Ballpark Village project. It is not as though the overwhelming majority of people who go to Ballpark Village are doing so as an alternative to staying at home and not going out for the night; it is an alternative to other entertainment. This doesn’t make it bad; I am by my own admission not a big fan of BPV, but this is strictly a matter of personal taste and not an indictment of its virtues. It simply means that, like a Wal-Mart moving into a small-ish city, it is a game-changer but not a game-expander.

In contrast to St. Louis as a National Football League market–good, probably better than some of the current ones, but not exceptional due to its relatively small size and the unlikelihood of pulling major swaths of fans away from the Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Bears, Indianapolis Colts, or Tennessee Titans fan bases that already exist in the extended region–St. Louis is an exceptional baseball market. It isn’t New York or Chicago, but it is a hub for a number of decent-sized cities. The odds of the Cardinals credibly claiming an intention to relocate outside of the St. Louis area are minimal because, unlike the NFL in the mid-2010s, there wasn’t a truly major city available as a threat, but even if this somehow happened, St. Louis would immediately become the first choice for relocation or expansion. And this is why St. Louis needs to be resolute. Take a page from the voters in Jackson County, Missouri, who overwhelmingly rejected the extension of a local sales tax for funding of Kauffman Stadium and Arrowhead Stadium, the respective homes of Kansas City’s Royals and Chiefs. These are two teams that can more credibly threaten relocation than the Cardinals (the Chiefs have implied a potential move to the Kansas side of the metropolitan area for a while now), yet voters who were mostly fans of the teams did the right thing.

For many, St. Louis essentially serves the purpose that Ballpark Village literally is–it is an entertainment district, a place to see major sporting events and concerts and maybe try a nice restaurant from time to time, but not a place with a moral obligation to provide for its residents. St. Louis Public Schools’ non-charter schools are dramatically underfunded. Its streets are covered in potholes, and despite proposals for expansion of a MetroLink system that would help mitigate road damage, it remains impractical for most city residents. A new stadium opened in the twenty-first century’s first decade, and the city’s population declined. In the 2010s, both of the city’s major league sports teams won championships and the population declined again. For St. Louis as a city, not merely as an exercise in branding, the status quo–community ownership of expenses with strident capitalism of profits–has not worked. And it cannot afford to be bullied by billionaires again.