The 2025 season isn't totally lost for the St. Louis Cardinals, but the fans seem to be out on this year's team, and it has reflected in their attendance numbers.
The Cardinals are three games below .500 at 68-71, but the Cincinnati Reds seem to be headed in the wrong direction, and the Cardinals are just 5.5 games back of the final Wild Card spot. Now, is it a tough hill to climb over the final month of the season? Yes, but it's certainly been done before, as baseball can be a funky sport in its last month of the regular season.
Cardinals' attendance numbers are historically bad
Cardinals' fans are historically one of the best groups in all of Major League Baseball, but the 2025 season marks the lowest average attendance since 2021, and it's been four straight seasons of average attendance dips.
Thus far throughout the season, Busch Stadium has averaged 28,165 attendees per home game, down 7,000 from 2024 and down 12,000 fans from the 2023 season.
That 28,165 attendees per game is good for the 19th-best mark in MLB. Compared to the 2023 season, those 40,000+ fans per home game ranked fourth-best in MLB. The Cardinals didn't even make the playoffs in 2023, and haven't played an October game since 2022, when they were knocked out in the Wild Card round by the Philadelphia Phillies.
The bad news for Busch Stadium is that there may be another strike on the horizon in Major League Baseball, which may hinder the Cardinals' home attendance in years to come. Paired with the fact that the front office expects to enter a rebuild 2026 season with Chaim Bloom as the new president of baseball operations.
St. Louis is trending in the wrong direction in terms of attendance, and if the performance on the field doesn't improve, the Cardinal fans will continue to be absent.