Despite down year, Cardinals keep impressive attendance record intact

The St. Louis Cardinals have failed to reach expectations for much of this decade, and the fans have not been shy about letting ownership know their disdain for the current state of the team. With a third consecutive season without a playoff appearance on the horizon, it has become commonplace to see plenty of empty red seats at Busch Stadium, which has become even worse with Bill DeWitt III finding humor in the situation.

In front of an embarrassingly low 17,516 fans against the Nomadic Athletics on Wednesday, the Cardinals actually put together a nice team performance to put them just one game under .500 on the season. That number is a slight uptick from the day prior, which saw the lowest-ever full-season crowd for a home game, but still nowhere near the 35,000-plus the Cardinals are accustomed to seeing.

The St. Louis Cardinals surpassed 2 million fans for the 40th consecutive season.

Coming into this transition season, fans were growing restless, as offseason promises failed to be delivered upon, and the 2025 St. Louis Cardinals roster was pretty much a copy and paste from the two years before. Fans on social media talked about how they would boycott the team and refuse to give the DeWitt family any of their hard-earned money, and at the start of the year, it looked like those statements were empty threats. Even with attendance falling below expected levels, there were multiple times the announced crowd was still in the 30,000 area, which probably allowed Bill DeWitt III to continue his humorous take on the fan feedback.

The Cardinals' strong May, which saw them finish the month as one of the best teams in baseball, inspired fans to get back to the park, and June opened up with the Royals and Dodgers bringing in over 170,000 paid tickets in the six-game home stand, but the concerning statistics started to show up near the end of the month. When the Cubs came to town, it was tradition to write in a sellout for the series, as fans for both teams would sit shoulder to shoulder, cheering on their teams. However, when the northsiders came to St. Louis, the highest announced attendance over the four-game set was just over 32,000. If fans were not coming to Busch for one of the best rivalries in the sport, maybe this boycott talk was serious.

Over the next two months, that 32,000 number was surpassed a grand total of three times, with even the Yankees being in town not being enough to bring in more than 33,800 fans for the weekend. When the Pirates came to town at the end of the month, the Cardinals were not able to approach the 20,000 fan number, and only a Labor Day game against the Athletics has pushed St. Louis into those digits. Even with these miserable turnouts (not blaming the fans at all), the Cardinals still managed to continue putting up impressive attendance numbers when compared to the rest of the league.

Wednesday's game against the Athletics had another low turnout, but the announced attendance was enough to put the Cardinals over two million tickets sold in the 2025 season. That marks the 40th consecutive year that they have surpassed that number, which is second only to the Dodgers for most seasons in a row welcoming in at least two million fans. While the Cardinals will not approach the 3,000,000 tickets sold this season, this streak is impressive nonetheless. Even if ownership's pockets are hurting after this season, it is tough to see major changes happening to get fans back in the ballpark.