Over the weekend, for the first time in 2025, two consecutive baseball games at Busch Stadium sold more than 40,000 tickets. And despite the presences of Adam Wainwright, Lance Lynn, and Jason Isringhausen, neither game featured the St. Louis Cardinals. It was the Savannah Bananas, the novelty barnstorming baseball team, that prompted the first capacity crowds since Opening Day.

Comparing the Bananas, an exhibition team more comparable to basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters than to a serious professional baseball team, to any Major League Baseball team is fairly ridiculous. As much as you might want to dunk on Erick Fedde or Miles Mikolas, both are considerably better baseball players than anyone on the Bananas; overall quality of play is not the draw here. But that these teams could draw such larger crowds than the actual local Major League Baseball team does reflect an important truth–there is an appetite for people to attend events at Busch Stadium. No matter how many grifting state representatives from the exurbs wish to paint St. Louis as an uninhabitable war zone and that this is why people are not attending Cardinals games, the fact of the matter is that games which disproportionately appealed to families with small children, with ticket prices registering far above Cardinals regular season or even postseason games, were the biggest draw of 2025.

The Cardinals are not having a historically miserable season, certainly not by the standards of all of Major League Baseball nor even by the standard of two years ago. But they remain mired in the mediocrity in which they have been stuck for the last decade. Any argument about what makes the Cardinals compelling ultimately comes back to ways in which it could be worse, but there is no draw. Entering play today, a game in which the Cardinals completed being swept by the Arizona Diamondbacks after three consecutive duds of starts from Andre Pallante, Sonny Gray, and Miles Mikolas, the Cardinals’ most valuable player by Wins Above Replacement was Brendan Donovan, a well-rounded and versatile player but somebody who, with single-digit home runs and largely irrelevant stolen base totals, isn’t exactly a major box office draw. The next two players, Masyn Winn and Victor Scott II, have decidedly more juice given their arm strength and speed, respectively, but both have nevertheless been below-average hitters.

Only one team in the National League, (unsurprisingly) the Colorado Rockies, have a less productive Best Player by WAR than Brendan Donovan; only one additional team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, lacks a position player more productive than Donovan (given the daily nature of a great position player rather than a great pitcher, I tend to give this priority when it comes to Having Fun, though when your pitcher is Paul Skenes, that arguably wrecks the curve a bit).

In this sense, the Cardinals are overachieving. They don’t have a truly star-level hitter and yet they’re still over .500. They have had truly awful starting pitching–three of their five starters sit in the upper-fours by both earned run average and fielding-independent pitching–and yet they’re still over .500. On some level, this is impressive, but on another level, this is revealing of a team that seems to be punching above its weight to merely reach the honor of having a roughly one-in-five chance, per projections from FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus among others, of sneaking into the third Wild Card position.

At this point, the St. Louis Cardinals have become utterly joyless. The team’s most marketable star, a future Hall of Famer and still highlight-generating third baseman in Nolan Arenado, was at the center of constant trade rumors all offseason, in a situation that still has not been resolved. And during a summer in St. Louis where virtually every day features at least one of oppressive heat or a torrential downpour, it’s just easier to find some other source of entertainment.

But in a very real sense, this should be liberating for the Cardinals. This isn’t the 2007 team, still riding the high of 2006 to a degree that selling off players at the trade deadline feels sacrilegious. Only Miles Mikolas and Ryan Helsley on the current Cardinals roster have been around for even a single Cardinals playoff victory–like, even a single game won. Ryan Helsley, by virtue of having a run as a truly dominant reliever, is one of a handful of Cardinals players for whom some fans have a genuine connection, but is any fan under any illusions that the just-turned-31 year-old pending free agent who performs a role with notoriously fickle results is a Future Lifelong Cardinal? While Phil Maton has pitched relatively well in 2025, is anybody all that attached to seeing him specifically in St. Louis? If Erick Fedde, Steven Matz, and/or Miles Mikolas can generate even a minimal return–a “here’s our 20th best prospect, we’ll take him if you pay his salary” kind of trade–is that not enough?

The Cardinals proved two years ago that they are not inherently committed to living in denial–when they fell out of contention, they traded away their pending free agents and they got a collection of useful prospects. No, Thomas Saggese and Tekoah Roby haven’t generated the kind of returns that, say, the Chicago Cubs got with Pete Crow-Armstrong, who they received as part of the Javier Báez trade in 2021, but the organization ought not be alarmed that they did not happen to hit the jackpot one time. Even if nothing that returns to the Cardinals amounts to much, and that is still the likeliest outcome, they have only one of the least popular eras of St. Louis Cardinals baseball to lose by trying.