703 Reasons to Root for the Cardinals — Sophisticated St. Louis

Last season was painful. Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III is very well aware.

by Craig Kaminer / photos by Taka Yamagimoto

Watching Cardinals baseball is heaven when they’re winning, but hell when they’re not. (I am sure you heard my wife screaming at the TV recently when they blew another game.) For the 36 years I have lived in St. Louis, they have always performed well even when they don’t make it to the World Series.

But of late, they have struggled. You can’t go anywhere in town without hearing fans complaining, conjecturing and even refusing to watch baseball. The fact the games are on Bally Sports Midwest and not a local channel doesn’t help.

While the team’s winning percentage is not up to our expectations, they were in fifth place in the division on May 15, seven games out of first place. Before you start booing, head to Busch to cheer them on. There are a lot of reasons to support the team and boost the players' morale. Call me a glass-half-full kinda guy.

The Cardinals telegraphed having a winning season after being in the basement last year. As of the All Star break, they are second in the NLC and in contention for the playoffs.

The new Katie’s Pizza & Pasta location at Ballpark Village.

So I met with the Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III to discuss what’s going on, what the management team is doing about it, and what’s in the works to keep fans’ heads and hearts in the game.

While every pundit has a theory of why the Cardinals have been off their game and who in the clubhouse should be sacrificed, the owners and management are acutely aware of what you are thinking. They read every article, watch every TV news station, and closely monitor social media. Don’t for a second think they are not as frustrated as you. They are.

But managing the Cardinals is like running any other multi-million dollar business. There are a myriad of moving parts, personalities, short- and long-term contracts, league restrictions and a full complement of issues ranging from real estate, concessions, sales and marketing, and public relations.

Bill DeWitt III in the newly renovated seating in the 703 Club.

Bill DeWitt III and his family legacy with the Cardinals.

DeWitt admits, “Last year was a disappointment and a wake-up call because we've been competitive for so long, some years better than others, but we made the playoffs three out of the last four. We hadn't had a losing record in over a decade. So last season was a bit of a shock to the system. But I think after the season ended, the analysis was about whether it was something we could address and fix or whether it was a trend and maybe we have to rethink this whole thing and rebuild. And Mo's (President of Operations John Mozeliak) conclusion was, along with the whole brain trust on the baseball side, including my father and others, that with some changes to the pitching, we could get back to our winning ways.”

DeWitt feels the recent changes in the pitching rotation have gone pretty well. He praised the work of Lance Lynn, Kyle Gibson and Sonny Gray.

“We feel good about it, but our hitting has been soft,” he says. Management can’t push too hard too early in the season on the hitting because no trades are going to be made. With a few games under .500 after one month, the management will have to evaluate their strategy over the next two months. But DeWitt is clear that they are not going to make knee-jerk decisions. They believe in the team and the players they have. Only time will tell if they are right.

Baseball has changed over the years; first with the advent of the Moneyball strategy of hiring undervalued players and investing in a strong analytics department. Then the MLB had to concede the game was starting to look like a game that people didn't really like as much anymore. The pitch clock is an example where pitchers and some hitters were taking so much time for reasons that were good for their own individual performance, but not necessarily good for the game.

DeWitt feels the new rule that created the pitch clock is a very positive response to all these trends.

The bottom line is it’s becoming harder to differentiate and there’s more parity on the field. In some ways this is good for baseball. Now the biggest differentiator is the size of the payroll. Trying to keep up with the Joneses in that regard has become more important.

“I'm not saying it's all about payroll, but it's just you're looking for different areas of differentiation to be able to achieve what we've always tried to achieve, which is consistently competitive teams, payroll is an obvious place to look.”

The Cardinals have hovered around tenth in terms of local revenue rankings, but they have slipped a couple of spots because some of the bigger markets have gotten even bigger and some of the medium markets have turned things around. But when you're at the bottom of the top third, DeWitt feels like that's a good spot for them to be in and they can compete every year if they make good decisions. When you're in the bottom third, you almost have to acknowledge that your competitive opportunities are going to be cyclical in nature. You're going to have to probably be bad for a few years, compile draft picks, have those work out, and then you can amplify those with spending that gets you back up into competing.

“We're hopefully going to stay in a spot where we don't have to do that,” DeWitt says.“That's not saying that we will never do that, but we certainly believe we have a shot at not having to do that if we make good decisions. We are never going to be at the Dodgers or the Yankees or the Red Sox revenue levels, but I think it doesn't mean we can't compete with them if we play our cards right.”

When I asked DeWitt if he personally lets the negativism around the team get to him, he jokingly said “You're probably going to be more mentally stable if you block out the distractions. Having said that, especially if you're in it for the long haul like we've been and we intend to be, I do think it's important to understand what's going on out there. So for example, if something's really trending related to our business or our team on social media, I want to know that. Any one individual comment is probably not a relevant data point, but a trend is a trend. We have some good people in our social media department who can help summarize that kind of stuff. We also get a lot of feedback from things like surveys. There's a standardized MLB fan survey now that we have been a part of. In fact, two years ago we were ranked number one in the industry for fan feedback in terms of the overall game-day experience. And we're still, even after a losing season, pretty highly ranked in that regard. A lot of times winning somehow spills over into whether your beer was cold or not.”

So St. Louis punches above its weight in terms of the size of the market. The Cardinals have seen attendance dip. “But it's also cause for us to rethink how we reach out to fans, what our messaging is, and try to understand what's most important and the relative importance of different things because the team on the field is the most important thing.”

DeWitt adds there is a whole set of other things that are very important for a fan when they're coming down to a ballpark: parking, safety, security, the seats, the ushers, and the food. “There's a lot to it beyond just winning while still acknowledging that winning's the biggest factor driving satisfaction.”

In addition to the upgraded food assortment, the friendly hospitality team makes a day at the ballpark that much more enjoyable.

One Cardinal Way, (featured in Sophisticated Living St. Louis, May/June 2021), is 95 percent leased. The residents came because of the Cardinals and for downtown living; they're staying because of the community. “They have friends that live there, they do things together and it's really pretty cool,” DeWitt says. “I think that's partly a function of the way we designed the building with that great community space above the garage and some of the programming we do to bring people together. We'd love to build another one. The challenge we face right now is to build that exact same building would be 35 percent more expensive and interest rates are higher.”

In typical fashion, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the RFT are second-guessing the Cardinal's’ management. Recently, the RFT reported that the Cardinals may be looking for $600-million in public financing to do improvements to Busch. The fact is the stadium is turning 20 years old and big systems such as the chillers or the HVAC systems, the scoreboards, and even the seating needs to be updated. But DeWitt emphasized the ownership invests “$8 to $10 million each year to maintain the stadium. “That's been our philosophy and it'll remain our philosophy,” he says. “It doesn't make any sense for us to be talking about whether we would ask for public money or not. We don't even know what we would ask for right now. So it was just a premature article. In my opinion, it's going to be a few years before we even have a game plan for refurbishing this stadium to buy another 20-plus years.”

“We continue to push for ways to make this stadium and Ballpark Village even more attractive for fans to come downtown. That's what it's all about. We want to be a great anchor. We want to be around forever and be a part of the solution downtown.”

For the 2024 season, the Cardinals added the Budweiser 703 Club (named for Albert Pujol’s 703 home runs) in the former Budweiser Bowtie Bar and the Casino Queen party porch. The area includes a full-service bar and an extensive menu. Ticket prices for the 703 Budweiser Club start at $99.

“Every year we like to do something different and new, and the 703 Club is our big one this year,” DeWitt says. “Now let's start to win.