Cardinals start fake attendance rumors early with a number that surely cannot be real

The St. Louis Cardinals have struggled tremendously over the last few seasons. While their front office has continued to try to put a winning team together, all they've accomplished is building one of the oldest teams in the game. Besides that, St. Louis has nothing to their name over the last few seasons.

It's like the front office has finally realized this because they've seemingly entered a rebuild heading into the 2025 season. St. Louis let a lot of their veterans walk in free agency to begin the offseason including Paul Goldschmidt, Lance Lynn, and Kyle Gibson. Following this, they began to express the interest of trading their star third baseman Nolan Arenado.

They've been backed in a corner with the Arenado trade, though. The star third baseman has a full no-trade clause and has only cleared a trade to six teams in the league. None of these teams have shown the willingness to come acquire him yet.

Now, the regular season has started and St. Louis is off to a bit of a fast start, on the field at least. The Cardinals are just three games into the 2025 season, but they've already managed to embarrass themselves.

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St. Louis Cardinals claim 30,000-plus fans in half empty stadium

As the Cardinals were wrapping up a sweep over the Minnesota Twins, the scoreboard at Busch Stadium flashed the stadium's attendance for the game: 30,712. The catch? One look around the stadium would show that there wasn't anywhere close to 30,000 people in attendance.

Busch Stadium has a total occupancy of 46,000. Judging by the empty seats all throughout the stadium, specifically in the upper decks, there's no way there are more than 20,000 fans in attendance for this game.

While I know this number indicates tickets sold including season tickets and such, it's still a bit embarrassing to post something like this on the scoreboard when it's clearly not an accurate representation of the fans in attendance.

I'm not sure what's more embarrassing. The fact that the Cardinals posted a clearly inaccurate number or the fact that the stadium was halfway empty during opening weekend on a Sunday afternoon.