A lot has been said about the rebuild of the St. Louis Cardinals and for good reason. The roster has been a work in progress in recent years, but what about the status of Busch Stadium and the St. Louis Cardinals TV deal? Both will play a role in the future of the team and where it goes from here.
I haven’t seen much discussion about what Bill Dewitt Jr. and Bill Dewitt III had to say during the recent Winter Warmup, but several comments addressed one big issue now and one that might become a big issue in the next few years. The need for the current Busch Stadium to get upgrades and renovations and the status of the St. Louis Cardinals TV deal.
When asked where the St. Louis Cardinals stand with the TV deal that remains to be resolved, Bill Dewitt Jr. said “From an internal business standpoint, it’s fairly disruptive in the sense that we’re trying to figure out whether we do another deal with FanDuel sports and have the status quo…or move over to MLB Media which a number of teams have done…both options are on the table still…we’ve been triaging the situation for awhile…having said that, from a fan’s standpoint, there shouldn’t be much interruption at all”. He inferred that no matter which road they chose, they’re hopeful that St. Louis Cardinals might end up on new platforms like YouTube TV, Amazon, etc. I saw an estimate by MLB.com today that teams like the Cardinals moving from a cable deal to MLB Media might result in huge loss of revenue. It said “For the clubs that lost their RSN deals, the broadcast deals replacing them have, on average, paid out about 50% of what clubs had received from their former cable deals.”
Bill Dewitt Jr. was also asked about how upcoming stadium improvements might be affected by the competitiveness of the team. He said “I would say it’s related, but not necessarily directly linked. We’re dealing with a stadium that’s 20 years old and it’s served us incredibly well. We plan on being here for a long, long time…but we’re going to have to do a project that’s multi-faceted at some point here in the near future and that time frame is dictated more by the physical reality of things than it is the competitive cycle, but you’d love to time it up…if we’re a huge playoff contender and a likely deep October type of team, you’d love for that to coincide with stadium renovations…but I don’t think they’re directly linked”. When asked about the timing of stadium upgrades, he said “sooner rather than later”, but he went on to talk about how they’re studying the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals interactions with the state of Missouri before they decide how they want to move forward. The context of their statements makes it clear that they have no plans to lobby for a new stadium in the near future, but upgrades to the current Busch Stadium are desirable over the next few seasons.
When you try to get a 10,000 foot view of the status of the St. Louis Cardinals right now, you can see that there are a lot of moving parts and much uncertainty. The DeWitt family says they are committed to making good baseball decisions now and they vow to invest in the team even more when it’s clear the Cardinals are ready to make a deep October run, but I have to wonder how the loss of TV revenue and the need for investment in Busch Stadium will factor in to the overall economy of the club. A perfect scenario would be for the stadium to get the upgrades it needs and a new more prosperous TV deal gets put in place when the St. Louis Cardinals new core is developed and ready to compete for titles again. Navigating from where we are today to that point is tricky. That’s a lot of “rebuilds” that need to be done right and soon.
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