With attendance down, Cardinals commit to improving Busch Stadium experience

New York Times

23-05-2025

ST. LOUIS — A bird's-eye view of Busch Stadium lately reveals what was once thought impossible.
Nestled in the downtown of a baseball-crazed city, the St. Louis Cardinals' home stands half-full most games. Dozens of sections in the upper level sit uninhabited. Some concession stands have been vacated. The roar of a usually passionate home crowd is muted.
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As the Cardinals navigate the early portion of their transition season, they have seen a significant drop-off in attendance.
The Cardinals set their lowest single-game recorded attendance of the Busch Stadium III era (since 2006) with a mere 20,309 attending on April 2 game against the Los Angeles Angels. From a league-wide perspective, categorizing Busch Stadium as a ghost town would be unfair. Heading into play Friday, St. Louis had drawn 686,954 fans this season, just above league average.
Their average official attendance numbers (note: not gate attendance) of 28,623 puts them at 13th in baseball. Still, for an organization that prides itself on holding a full house on a nightly basis — and one that until last year had drawn at least 3 million fans in every (non-COVID) season since the stadium opened — those numbers are far short of the norm.
Just a year ago, the Cardinals averaged 35,532 fans despite finishing 10 games out of first place. This year's team is playing some of the best ball in the National League — 16-6 over its past 22 games — but the turnstiles remain slow.
The dramatic decline in ticket sales did not catch the Cardinals off guard. Ownership was prepared for this scenario, and attendance has matched up with what the organization budgeted for. But efforts to entice fans to the ballpark continue to be an emphasis. As the team itself undergoes a transition year, the business side is doing the same. In what will likely be a down year in attendance, even if the team keeps up its strong play, Cardinals brass is committing to finding new ways to draw fans back to Busch Stadium.
'Frankly, with the team being in a cyclical downturn, we are creating that urgency to do absolutely everything we can to make the game and the experience more fun and more exciting,' team president Bill DeWitt III told The Athletic.
The organization's experiment? Improving — and in some areas, revamping — the game-day experience. That's where senior vice president of business operations Anuk Karunaratne comes into play.
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The Cardinals hired Karunaratne ahead of the 2024 season, when longtime senior vice president for sales and marketing Dan Farrell retired. Karunaratne drew praise for his work with the Toronto Blue Jays, where he served as the executive vice president of business operations. His responsibilities included overseeing business administration, team sales and marketing, and the fan experience at Rogers Centre.
Now he's doing much of the same with the Cardinals, but the task remains challenging. Encouraging a dissatisfied fan base to come to the stadium, even with the team's strong start, is no easy feat. But it is crucial when considering the organization's long-term sustainability.
'Obviously, when you go into the part of the cycle that we're in now, you know your opportunities to grow the fan base are less than when the team is winning,' Karunaratne said. 'But the things you focus on from the business side are still the same. We focused on building an understanding of our fans, existing and prospective, and tried to look at what we needed to do (to improve). What audiences do we need to connect with or establish with in order to maintain and strengthen our fandom — and increase their likelihood of attending?'
Karunaratne's efforts have centered on bringing in younger fans. He noted Cardinals' baseball tradition resonates with several generations, but said that the organization needs to be cognizant of all generations when mapping out the in-game experience. That's why many of the team's new directives focus on appealing to fans in their 20s to 30s.
A few examples: The Cardinals have launched $5 Friday nights at Budweiser Terrace, the gathering spot in the upper deck in right field, where fans can purchase $5 hot dogs, $5 draft beers and $6 margaritas all game long, with live music and a DJ. It's the first event of its kind at the stadium, and it's designed to turn the game into a social event.
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St. Louis is also following in the footsteps of many other teams by adding a post-game summer concert series for the first time. Two shows are on the schedule: country singer Cole Swindell will perform on June 20 after the Cardinals play the Cincinnati Reds, and hip-hop star Flo Rida will take the stage on July 15 after St. Louis takes on the Atlanta Braves.
'What was clearly a big priority is thinking about how we connect with a new generation and a younger fan base that has very different expectations about attending a live event and how they consume the game,' Karunaratne explained. 'What that group of people is looking for looks different than prior generations. The challenge is, you have to be able to deliver multiple different experiences. There is no longer a one-size-fits-all approach.'
At the same time, the Cardinals don't want to alienate their fans who come to games strictly for the baseball experience. But they do want to modernize that experience. Over the offseason, the team underwent a multi-million-dollar scoreboard graphic renovation project. The updated technology allows for trending stats, such as exit velocity, launch angle and vertical and horizontal break to be available in real time, alongside the standard stats like velocity and pitch type.
'We changed the scoreboard presentation because we were trying to think about how we can bring in more stats and create more of a compelling scoreboard look for people who are watching the game and do want to see some of the advanced stats,' Karunaratne said. 'For more of our baseball-centric audience, we're trying to enhance that experience.'
The Cardinals also replaced and rewired their speaker system throughout the ballpark, and installed a control system so they can manage different sound levels — and different sounds altogether — in various sections. Some sections will play music, while others will feature either the television or radio broadcast.
'This is all part of the process,' DeWitt said. 'We want to be in a much more creative and experimental phase of what works and what doesn't as we look at fan segmentation and attracting younger fans, but also serving our long-term fans too.'
Now, the simple solution for drawing more fans is to field a winning product. That is not lost on the ownership or president of baseball operations John Mozeliak. Busch Stadium did not earn its moniker as 'Baseball Heaven' for nothing. If the Cardinals are playing well, the fan base will respond accordingly. But with most ticket sales coming via season ticket packages (most of which are purchased before the season ), it will be hard to make up for the deficit already.
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'This is about where we thought we'd be,' DeWitt said. 'Now, hopefully, we can exceed that given the better team performance lately, but that remains to be seen. A big chunk of our ticket sales — usually around 70 percent — happen before the season. So it's really almost impossible to catch up to where we might have been in previous years. But if we can exceed our budget, then it creates all sorts of opportunities to make things a little easier.'
For now, the Cardinals will operate under some financial restraints. Upgrading the fan experience, while necessary, does come at a cost. That those changes are happening simultaneously with the changes being made on the baseball side is no coincidence.
'We have transitions happening on both the baseball and the business side,' DeWitt said. 'We feel really good about the leadership on both sides, and they do require investments. The investments are being made when revenues are in decline, for obvious reasons. But this is one of those things where we feel it's important to be laying the groundwork for future success.
'If everything goes well on the field, that's great, but in order to sustain it, you need a sustainable economic business model. We feel like we were there for a long period of time, and I think we have the team that will get us back to that. Everyone focuses on the baseball side mostly, which is understandable, but it's just as important on the business side.'
In their attempts to attract more fans, the Cardinals won't stray from the ideas that have reliably brought success.
'We always have and always will be super focused on our promotional dates and giveaways, things that entice certain groups to come to the game,' DeWitt said. 'But in doing that, we have sometimes lost sight of why people really come. Baseball is unique in that it owns the summer. We're trying to reach everybody, all of these different groups, in a different way.'
The summer months will be the true test for the organization. Their upcoming series, a three-game set against the Arizona Diamondbacks over Memorial Day Weekend, should serve as a checkpoint. It helps that the Cardinals' recent surge has helped propel them from five games under .500 in mid-April to three games behind the first-place Chicago Cubs in the division.
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But even if the Cardinals' play fades, the organization will continue trying to improve the game-day experience. Bringing fans to the ballpark is vital to the organization's future.
'More than anything, we're recommitting to our purpose on the business side, which is to grow our brand, to find ways to authentically connect with our fans and provide them with a world-class entertainment experience,' Karunaratne said. 'If we can do those things and do them well, I think we'll have fulfilled the part of the promise that we're responsible for.
'There's always the piece of how does the team play? This year, that's different than past years — Mozeliak and ownership have talked about the plan to get back to where we want to be on the baseball side of things. But in the interim, whatever the final attendance numbers this year are, we are still going to have millions of people coming through our gates, and we owe it to those people to give them a top experience.'
(Top photo of Victor Scott II at Busch Stadium on May 7: Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)