The Cardinals’ failures of 2023 are hurting attendance, and that’s a good thing

There’s no such thing as a wrong or right way for fans to respond to the poor performance of team ownership, but in the Cardinals’ case a message is being sent.

Urgent bulletin: The Cardinals are a bad team this season. They’ve already ensured their first losing season since 2007, and they’re quite likely to clock their first 90-loss campaign since 1990. This year’s model has been above .500 for exactly one (1) day, and that was way back yonder on April 2. The current standings of course reflect these realities better than anything else, but a perhaps more acutely felt indicator is the club’s home-attendance figures. 

Attendance is up league-wide. The general line of thinking is that this is in response to the suite of rule changes that have improved pace of play and led to a base-running revival of sorts. Maybe that’s the case, but there are probably causation-correlation flaws in that thinking. Never mind that, though. What matters for our purposes is that the Cardinals have seen their attendance fall in defiance of these league-wide trends.