Why Watching the Cardinals Feels Like a Side Quest Now

There was a time when watching the St. Louis Cardinals was simple. You turned on the TV, found the channel, and let the game live in the background while you did something productive, like pretending to understand your retirement account.

Now? Watching the Cardinals feels like trying to break into your own house without setting off the alarm.

In this week’s episode, we unpacked the slow collapse of the regional sports network model. You remember it as Fox Sports Midwest. Then it became Bally. Then bankruptcy happened. Then it came back wearing a fake mustache as FanDuel Sports, like a guy who got caught and thought shaving his beard made him unrecognizable.

The problem is not just branding. It’s that the old cable bundle was basically a “sports tax” everyone paid, and teams got a reliable money pipe out of it. But younger fans do not have cable, and casual fans are not going to hunt for 162 games like it’s a scavenger hunt. When it becomes harder to watch, people stop caring. When people stop caring, they stop showing up. And when attendance drops, downtown St. Louis feels it in the bars, restaurants, and hotels that live off game-day traffic.

That’s why the idea of MLB taking over local broadcasts keeps coming up. The most interesting part is what it could do to blackouts. If MLB is running the show, you at least have a shot at ending the “blacked out in your market” nonsense that makes paying customers feel like criminals.

Then, because our brains are broken in the modern era, we pivoted from sports to Venezuela and oil. Sanctions, tankers, discounts, and the kind of “world police” energy that makes international organizations feel like a suggestion box.

And yes, we went full internet and ended up discussing Stranger Things theories, because nothing says “grown men with mortgages” like debating wormholes and the Upside Down.

The takeaway is simple: if you want fans to care, make it easy to watch. If you want cities to thrive around teams, give people a reason to show up. And if you want to survive adulthood, keep a bucket handy. Just in case.