Today’s Paid Attendance is …Cue the Ricky Horton jokes
I, too, thought the recently completed home series with the Chicago Cubs could be a defining series, but in a totally different way than some of my writing colleagues.
To me, one of the most remarkable stories of the early 2025 baseball season hasn’t been between the white lines. It’s been the stands. Or perhaps better described as what hasn’t been in the stands. Fans. They’ve been remarkably absent and the seats remarkably empty. Empty in ways that makes observers wonder just how badly this franchise has hit the skids. In a way, it’s a bit … sad.
For years, there has been an under-current of waiting for fan backlash over fuzzy management direction and lukewarm on-field results (by Cardinal standards), but the temper tantrums seen in online fan posts never quite materialized at the gate. Until they did. It really started last summer, but boy it has really hit this year. Seemingly with a vengeance. Rejection and apathy can be a bit harsh that way.
While the Cardinals are not particularly forthcoming with attendance data, we can measure some things and interpolate others from there. Since Busch III opened, until 2024, the Cardinals had never once fallen below 30,000 paid attendance. Paid attendance includes season ticket sales (whether or not those ticket owners actually attended), along with mini-package sales combined with more contemporary single game and walk-up ticket sales. These last 2 vary significantly based on time of year, weather, opponent and other factors. The worst case on the one-time and walk-up sales is zero ticket sales, the mid-case seems to about 6,000 and the top-end more than 10,000.
Season ticket sales are set in stone before the season draws nigh. So, we can know that if paid attendance has never been less than 30,000, the floor of season (and mini package) ticket sales is likely around 30,000. I reasoned that surely, at least once they’ve had near zero walk-up sales, such as an unscheduled day-night doubleheader mid-week against a middling opponent where the weather hasn’t quite cleared out (they did). So, I used the lowest of these announced attendance figures as the floor of what the season ticket sales experience has been. In practice, I believe that in some years, the Cardinals have had to close off season ticket sales in the 38,000 range to leave adequate headroom for walk-up and single-game ticket sales. The 38,000 figure represents the zenith of season ticket sales and defines what the typical walk-up sales is likely to be (6,000-ish) that they hold in reserve.
In 2025, they experienced an announced low of tickets sold 20,306 at an early season game. With this, we can draw some revised conclusions about how far they’ve fallen in season ticket sales. Yes, it was the Angels. Yes, it was a day game, mid-week. Yes, weather has not been their friend. A pretty good recipe for having that near-zero single-game and walk-up sales event. So, what we can infer here is that 2025 season ticket sales were at or perhaps even below 20,000. That is a remarkable drop from either 30,000 (the prior low-end) or 38,000 (the prior high point).
Doing a little math, I think we can infer that it appears that the Cardinals have experienced a loss in season ticket sales of somewhere between 33% and 45% over the last couple of years, mostly this year. Stunning. Worse, from the visual, it’s pretty clear that a fair number of the remaining season ticket holders are not appearing at games, and mini-packages and walk-up sales/single-game sales are not filling the gap. One can see evidence of this by the price of tickets on the secondary market (StubHub). Anecdotal, yes, but re-affirming what the eyes tell us, too.
I suspect there are some micro- and macro-economic factors that play into this decline, although that doesn’t explain very much of it, as these factors would seem to affect everyone in the league. But not everyone has had such a precipitous decline in attendance. In fact, few have. Leaving the A’s and Rays out for obvious reasons, the Cardinals are pretty much Exhibit A. I mean, I get it. Spending on baseball is discretionary, and discretionary income is cut first when the economy worsens. And while the poll numbers on consumer confidence are lower than normal and some data indicates some consumers are pulling back, the basic economic data (inflation, wage growth, unemployment, etc.) doesn’t suggest the kind of sharp pull back the Cardinals are experiencing.
As alluded to earlier, season ticket sales are counted in attendance figures even if the people don’t appear. There are no publicly available “actual” attendance figures, but one only has to look in the background of still photos taken of game action to realize that many seats are empty, irrespective of what the published paid attendance figure is. And the pictures depict the field level seats, not the more sparsely populated upper regions of the stadium. So, tickets purchased have fallen off from prior years, and actual attendance lags ticket purchase by a fair bit. Economic factors don’t explain the bought, but empty, seat. Do they?
Season-ticket holder purchases and subsequent attendance has always been a bit of a complex factor to discern. Many season-ticket holders are business entities who buy the tickets with the intent of “comping” them out to employees and/or customers as a reward or perk. When the social factors line up, this is a nice perk well received by the recipient, who attends. When the factors are mis-aligned, it’s not much of a perk and the business can’t give them away. Ouch!
One thing that has been noticeable over the years is that season ticket sales tend to lag performance on the field by a year or two. Buyers make their decision in the winter prior to a season and are likely heavily influenced by how the team performed in the year (or years) prior and how they perceive the near-term prospects for said team. One could say this year’s season ticket sales is likely, in part, a referendum of the last couple years of the on-field product.
While attendance lags generally, in certain, somewhat rare, circumstances, you can see attendance figures jump simultaneous with team performance. These would be, ostensibly, driven by single game and walk-up sales as interest picks up. An example of this would be the year McGwire chased the Maris HR record. An attendance jump from the prior year from 2.6m fans to 3.2m fans, even though the 1997 club was not great and the 1998 outlook was not either, was largely supported by the spectacle of the homerun chase.
Since that time, the floor of paid attendance has been 3m tickets sold, per year, with the ceiling reaching 3.55m tickets sold several years. Even in the awful year of 2023, the Cardinals sold 3.2m tickets. This is the lag effect from good 2021 and 2022 seasons. This year, it appears the Cardinals are on track for 2.4m tickets sold. It is hard to say how many fans are actually in the seats, but maybe 60-70% of that total?
Many are asking the question, “What brings them back?”. I suspect the team is, too. As perhaps the businesses around the ballpark, even.
First and foremost, it is likely widely accepted that winning is crucial. But even that widely accepted phrase has a lot of nuance and variability. Is winning mean being over .500? Is winning meaning making the playoff? Or winning the division? Or advancing to the NLCS or beyond? Obviously, winning the World Series would help, but only one team can do that, and the other 29 teams have to find a way to attract fans on a recurring basis. How?
Fundamentally, research has described that sports fans make a decision on buying tickets (and attending the game, which is a separate decision), on six main factors:
- Price sensitivity: Consumers are highly responsive to price, with discounts being a top deciding factor in purchase.
- Accessibility: The ease of purchasing tickets can significantly impact the purchase decision.
- Purchase timing: The timing of the purchase can influence the likelihood of a sale.
- Perceived value: The perceived value of the ticket compared to the price is crucial.
- Event lineup: The lineup of events can influence the decision.
- Social Factors: The actions and attitudes of others (friends/family) can sway both the purchase and attendance decision.
I’d propose it is pretty much a given that Accessibility is not a major issue. Getting tickets isn’t hard. They, today, are not in great demand and the tools to acquire them are as easy as putting StubHub on your phone.
Likewise, Timing is not a major issue, with one major exception. The one exception on timing is weather. Walk-up and single-game ticket sales are most definitely influenced by weather concerns. This year’s weather has been notably bad and likely suppressed ticket sales (and actual attendance) somewhat, although how much is questionable.
In baseball, the event line-up is two-fold. One is – who is playing. No different than a musical concert. U2 draws better than Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam draws better than the Gootsbies. “Who?”, you ask. Exactly. The season calendar is well known, and decades of experience tell us the Cubs draw better than the Pirates. Dynamic pricing tells us that, too. The effect of reducing the number NL Central games should not be discounted totally, in that those teams are generally better draws than say, an AL Central team.
The second part of event line-up manifests itself in the question “What are we going to do before/after the game?”. Teams that have sports venues surrounded by popular night clubs, restaurants and other ancillary venues tend to draw better. Besides BPV, is the neighborhood around the park seen as fun and enticing?
That takes us to Price, Value and Social Factors. Surprised?
Price and value go hand in hand, as noted above. Price is tangible. $X for a ticket in Y section. While the price of Cardinal game tickets is not as outrageous as other venues (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York), the total cost of tickets, food and parking have undoubtedly influenced St. Louis-area fans in a negative way. Peculiarly, the Cardinals chose to raise ticket prices for the 2025 season. Ticket revenue is crucial to this enterprise, perhaps more so than any other MLB team. But it was a tone-deaf move, for sure.
Value is intrinsic and very hard to measure. In baseball, value is often expressed as the fan’s expectations. Do they go expecting to see a good game? Or do they buy a ticket when their expectation of winning the game is higher? Ultimately, fans want to be entertained for a period of time and like to root for a winner. The last couple of years, especially 2023, have been less than entertaining. Unfortunately, there have been a handful of those in the more recent memory. 2017 and 2018 weren’t pretty. 2021 was saved by a 17-game winning streak and both 2021 and 2022 were saved by last minute scrambles by management to patch obvious pitching deficiencies overlooked earlier.
Value proposition goes tightly with the price. Consumers can be very fickle about this. They will buy an item even as the price rises, then one day, they re-think their purchase and question if it is worth the value. Often, their evaluation includes some memory of a prior price point and a prior level of perceived value. I remember when I bought bleacher ticket for $6. Do I want to pay $106 today, for this seat, to see this team? The minute a team crosses that invisible red line of Price > Value, they lose a sale and perhaps a customer, and they will struggle to get them back.
In baseball (really in all sports), value is heavily influenced by fans’ attitudes towards the team. Historically, Cardinal fans have had strongly positive attitudes toward the team and retain their connection to the team through changes in management, players and even the stadium. It seems the Cardinals brand has become a bit stale over the last decade and that shows up in less fanatic, more apathetic attitudes. “Who cares?” is the worst place for a team to be if struggling to attract fans. Ask the Colorado Rockies, who draw best when teams like St. Louis come to town and bring their legion of fans with them. They love the ticket sales, but the non-sustainability of Cardinal fans outnumbering Rockies’ fans must be vexing. In St. Louis, the Cardinals have become oddly disconnected from, perhaps a bit aloof from, their fanbase. Perhaps a languishing impact of the COVID era, where the fans found other things to do and lost some of that connection? One could say it is hard to ignore 4 straight years of declining ticket sales since the COVID era passed.
Social Factors are the odd ball here. Attendance at a baseball game is rarely a solo event, so the team really has to generate interest among multiple people before tickets are bought and maybe even a bit more than interest if people are to actually attend. Let’s face it, if Mom doesn’t feel like going tonight, the family may not go. The “employee of the month” may not see great value in taking the kids downtown to a Tuesday night, school-night game against the White Sox. If it is cold and rainy, maybe we’ll just stay home tonight. And they all stay home even if Johny really wants to go. There seems to be a general ambivalence about being downtown in the evening these days. Not necessarily people are convinced they are going to be mugged but more dreading the insecurity of certain spaces down there, and some of the homelessness, poverty and blight that they will have to step around. That is not a good feeling and one likely not to increase sales of tickets or fans actually attending games, particularly if other factors (attitude, price, weather, etc.) aren’t favorable.
This last part gets to what I call “irritants”. If motivated by spectacle (think the McGwire and Pujols home run chases), fans will indulge a certain level of irritant to buy tickets and attend a game (or a concert, or a…). Yes, traffic can be a pain, and parking too, but fans will tolerate some of those irritants. But less so if the other factors are (value, spectacle, connection, etc.) are absent. One of the historical drivers of attendance at Busch has been the regional draw the Cardinals have experienced. I am how wondering if the totality of irritants like the drive time, downtown experience, cost of tickets, hotels and restaurants is influencing that regional draw now.
One last impact that is hard to gauge is the notion that St. Louis has long been a baseball-only town, since the demise of the Rams tenure here. How has competition from soccer and hockey affected attendance? Not so much competition from actual games occurring at the same time, but from those other franchises having better connection or better perceived value for the cost, or maybe a greater sense of spectacle and more “in” and less “stale”. This is hard to evaluate but it seems like just another termite eating away at the foundation of support.
The Cardinals are very attuned to their fan base and have been aware for some time that ticket sales were going to be an issue this year. It certainly influenced their payroll budget for this year and perhaps for follow-on years as well. I have been curious about how this would evolve as the season progressed. The apparent lack of recovery in attendance could well be one of the strongest influencing variables as they decide which way to turn as the trade deadline approaches.
To-date, I’d generally say the Cardinals have been more fun to watch and more competitive than they have been in some time, but it doesn’t seem to be influencing paid (or actual) attendance all that positively. Last night, the Cardinals drew just over 29,000 fans for a game against a good regional draw (Braves) and with the team 1.5 games out of a wild card birth. Similarly, the Cards/Cubs series recently completed series averaged slightly less than 30,000 paid (and likely less in actual attendance), a low-end threshold not seen for a Cubs series since the moribund last days of the brewery owning the team. As I have watched the season progress, I have looked at the calendar and saw this mid-season Cubs series as a bellwether. Not so much for how it might impact the Cardinals competitiveness in the standings (it was only 4 June games after all), but how it might reflect the trajectory of attendance, and define how well the fanbase is embracing this team. It makes one wonder how much of the “connection” the team has with its fanbase has been disrupted. And how they get that back. Or IF get they get that back.