Last night, the St. Louis Cardinals earned one of the more thrilling victories that they will notch in 2025. Once trailing by three, they tacked on five runs in the fifth inning. After surrendering that lead, with Riley O’Brien giving up a game-tying double to Ronny Simon in the top of the ninth inning, the Cardinals flipped the script in the bottom of the ninth when Alec Burleson hit a two-out walk-off home run. This is a cool thing that happened. While the number of people who actually witnessed the walk-off heroics is impossible to gauge and always has been, with even the most anticipated of games having its fair share of no-shows and seat abandonments, we do know the announced attendance–17,675.

In the macro sense, 17,675 is a lot of people. I don’t think I’ve met 17,675 people in my life. 17,675 is more than double the combined enrollment of my high school and my college. But for a baseball game at Busch Stadium, it was a remarkably low mark–the lowest in the history of this iteration of Busch Stadium aside from games that were legally barred from having larger crowds at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s somewhat jarring that the nadir would have happened last night in particular. Sure, the Cardinals are having a relentlessly mediocre season and their opponent, the Pittsburgh Pirates, are having a worse one, and Monday is such an undesirable night for live events that Broadway doesn’t even tend to schedule shows for it, but still–it was a night game, so it wasn’t competing with most fans’ work or school schedules, and while most of the summer of 2025 has been brutally hot, that was not the case yesterday. It was the lowest attendance for a St. Louis Cardinals home game, non-COVID, since August 25, 1997 (also a Monday night), in a game against the Montreal Expos that had been rescheduled from four and a half months earlier. For regularly scheduled games, you’d have to go back to September 11, 1995, during the Mike Jorgensen era of Cardinals baseball, at a time when the previous version of Busch Stadium still had artificial turf. The day before, the St. Louis Rams hosted their first ever home game on the same field, to a much more robust attendance of 59,335. Of course, those who attended that game could see three future Pro Football Hall of Famers (Jerome Bettis and Isaac Bruce for the Rams; Willie Roaf for the Saints), while those who attended the baseball game the next day could only see one (San Francisco Giants outfielder Deion Sanders).

In 2025, the Cardinals have averaged 28,660 fans per home game. Compared to recent years, this is very lackluster, though for much of their history, and for Major League history in general, this is actually a fairly impressive attendance total. In fact, their raw total of 1,891,550 fans is already a higher total than the Cardinals sent through the turnstiles in any season from 1969 through 1981, and for any season prior to 1967. The Cardinals will almost certainly eventually surpass the attendance of the 1967 and 1968 teams, which averaged 99 wins during their back-to-back pennant-winning campaigns.

That said, the only season in my lifetime where the Cardinals struggled this mightily to draw fans, aside from seasons where they were legally prohibited from doing so, was 1995, when the team was truly awful and attendance across the sport was suffering after the mid-year cancellation of the 1994 season. It would be disingenuous to pretend that what is happening in St. Louis with baseball attendance is not a major outlier. This is something that surely concerns Cardinals ownership and surely concerns Cardinals management, but if you are merely a fan, one with no more than an emotional stake in the St. Louis Cardinals, why should it matter to you?

Of the 2.9 million people in the St. Louis combined statistical area, the number that attended last night’s game is statistically insignificant. And of the 2.89 million who did not attend, I was one of them. I wasn’t making some sort of grand point, some righteous protest against the St. Louis Cardinals organization for their recent on-field mediocrity. I didn’t even make a conscious decision that I was not going to attend the game–that’s not the way these things work. Attending the game would require an active opt-in. And while I certainly could have made attending the game work, it would have required some planning and some commitment to the cause. I was a relatively good candidate to attend the game–I am a sports fan, I didn’t have anything else going on at night, I live relatively close to Busch Stadium. But had I decided I wanted to go, since the game started at 6:45, I would have had to plan for dinner–the leftovers I ate at 6:30 would not have been an option if I wanted to get to the game in time. I still would have had to plan for transportation–parking at the stadium or taxis/ride-shares can easily triple the total cost of a cheap ticket to a game, bus schedules are inconsistent, I would have to drive to the nearest MetroLink stop and even if I considered the five bucks for the train ticket to be immaterial, the extra time for riding home from the game would have meant I would be far more tired the next day for work. At 7:30 p.m., I drank a Fresca, which as far as I can tell is not an available beverage option at Busch Stadium; even if I had wanted to drink water or beer or some other beverage available at the stadium, it’s way cheaper at home.

These are the considerations of me, a person who does not have children and can drive to Busch Stadium in roughly fifteen minutes. Of course, even when Busch Stadium sells out, the vast majority of people in the St. Louis area are not in attendance, and there are similarly literally millions of stories of people who opted to do something else. In the micro sense, it should be extremely easy to understand why a given person chooses not to attend a specific event, and realistically nobody is going to begrudge my choices, but when low attendance is noted in the macro sense, it is still a broad criticism that tens of thousands of people should have made the individually inconvenient decision for some sort of collective good.

Of course, the idea that well-attended Cardinals games are a collective good is centered around the elephant in the room–team relocation. The St. Louis Cardinals probably aren’t going to relocate any time soon, but they could, and they will assuredly dance around the possibility once ownership decides it is time for a new stadium. Even when attendance is good, owners find whatever credible threat they can–the possibility of a stadium being built in the Illinois suburbs of St. Louis was already dangled last go-around, and across the state, despite attendance for the Kansas City Chiefs being so strong that they are effectively the protagonists of North American sports, the threat is relocation to the Kansas side of the metropolitan area. It isn’t likely to alienate as many fans if the team remains in the same general geographic area, gullible St. Louisans who bought into the “the Chiefs are Missouri’s NFL team” marketing ploy aside, but it is the same basic premise.

It is a flaw of America that we have placed such civic pride in privately-held institutions–the true ruling class of America detests the notion of public ownership of anything in ways far beyond the scope of sports, but hates it specifically in sports so much that all of the major leagues prohibit community ownership of teams while giddily promoting the one grandfathered exception to the rule, the Green Bay Packers, as an exemplar of fan loyalty when in a more logical society, they would be the only team considered worthy of being treated as more than a consumer product in the first place. Of course, the Green Bay Packers, despite being legally a non-profit, have rubber-stamped every franchise relocation in the NFL since the AFL-NFL merger, ensuring their status as the sports world’s permanent petite bourgeoisie.

My biggest criticism of Dan McLaughlin when he was the Cardinals’ full-time television announcer was how giddily he mocked the relatively small crowd sizes in other markets, most notably Cincinnati and Miami. Even at the peak of the Cardinals viewing Johnny Cueto and/or Brandon Phillips as enemies, I never saw Reds fans as my enemies–I saw them as a group of people who might have had other stuff to do besides spend their money, and often even more importantly their time, on mediocre baseball teams. McLaughlin became the Cardinals’ television announcer in 2000, which marked a significant turning point for the franchise for reasons unrelated to him–suddenly, a team that had made one playoff appearance in the previous decade and mostly depended on Mark McGwire’s not-at-all-suspicious home run heroics to remain in the local zeitgeist was in the upper class of Major League Baseball. The Cardinals were so good that they became hated–do you remember what it was like to be hated? Wasn’t that fun?

The Cardinals are almost certainly about to miss the playoffs for the third time in as many years, and unlike the 2016-2018 stretch, where the Cardinals at least remained a viable playoff contender until late September, this version of the Cardinals is pretty much irrelevant. Assuming Miles Mikolas is no longer on the St. Louis Cardinals next season (he is a pending free agent having a terrible season so it seems unlikely, but I suppose you never know), the franchise will no longer employ a single player who has won a single postseason game with the Cardinals. For years, there was a clear face of the franchise–aside from one four-month stretch, the Cardinals employed at least one of Yadier Molina, Albert Pujols, Mark McGwire, or Ozzie Smith for 41 consecutive seasons. In 2025, the closest thing the Cardinals have to a face of the franchise is a third baseman who it doesn’t seem like really wants to be here (one of the other candidates seems to be trying to take a break himself).

There will always be people with explanations for the Cardinals’ lagging attendance, and it will always fit into their worldview, conveniently enough. Many Cardinals fans want the team to spend more, so the team’s relative lack of spending is the reason. The Nick Schroer-type exurban politicians will take every opportunity to vilify St. Louis and try to claim that the reason is crime (I cannot begin to describe what an unbelievable wimp you have to be to be afraid to walk around the well-lit, heavily secured concourse of Busch Stadium with tens of thousands of potential witnesses to any potential crimes). Those of us who are in constant fear of climate disaster will blame the heat. And all of these arguments are partially true–even if Schroer’s fears are based on completely baseless reasons, that does not mean that the fear itself is not real.

But also, you, the individual, do not need an excuse. Unless you are an employee of the St. Louis Cardinals, you are under no obligation to do anything for the Cardinals. I used to buy Madden video games every year, but they’ve been terrible for years, so I stopped buying them; this is a completely normal response to inferior products. When I was a little kid, every year for Christmas, I received a copy of the ESPN Sports Almanac, a product that I assume future generations will assume was made up as a plot device in Back to the Future Part II but which I assure you very much existed, and eventually, I stopped receiving them. It wasn’t because the books got worse. It wasn’t because the books stopped being made, though surely that point has also long since come and gone. It was because I now had quick access to the internet and didn’t have as much use for a physical sports statistic book anymore. Times change; demand changes; there is a such thing as private charity, and it is often a very admirable thing, but ESPN was not a private charity hurting for my or your money. And neither are the St. Louis Cardinals.