St. Louis Cardinals: How to Dilute Your Franchise and Lose Fans

First, and this is key:  Have a strong franchise.  One with decades of fan loyalty and devotion built generation to generation.  Make sure you have players that are icons.  You’ll need that so fans have idols to talk about their entire lives.  They need to be players that really define your city and symbolize your values.  You’ll also want to have success.  Lots of it.  To successfully follow this program your franchise must have some World Series trophies scattered around.  And its always nice to have the occasional pennant, as well as individual achievements like a Cy Young or MVP.  This makes the fans love you and give you eternal loyalty. And once you have that you can exploit the hell out of it. 

Believe me, this can take a long time to do.  Take your time because once you have something like this in place, you basically have an automatic get out of jail free card with your fan base. And no matter what you do, they’ll be coming through the turnstiles.  You wont even be able to keep the jerseys, hats, flags, or posters in stock they’ll buy them so fast.  That’s the beauty of this program.  Your franchise will be so en-grained in their hearts and souls that its borderline sacrilege in your town to speak ill of it.  You can do no wrong.

Now that you have a model franchise, here’s how you ruin it.

Step 1:  Hire an admitted user of performance enhancing drugs to coach your team’s hitters.  This is important because he’ll be able to show them the finer points of using steroids, HGH, and other substances that the general public doesn’t even know about.  And when skeptics point out his career batting average as being awful, or his total lack of coaching experience, you’ll be able to talk up how he is a student of the game, really likes coaching, and how he is a big proponent of studying video.  Don’t worry even if he has disgraced himself and his team, you have Bud Selig, the players union, and all the owners to cover you.  Thankfully they all turned a blind eye when players were becoming as big as mountains, so now when you hire one of those guys and reward him with a position of authority; it deflects plenty of the blame.  Besides, its not like you’ll be doing something really awful like hiring Pete Rose, and admitted lire and cheat is it?   

Step 2:  Fire the GM who architect-ed one of the greatest periods of prosperity in your team’s history.  You’ll need some type of excuse to put the blame on him of course.  So it’s always good to use “a shift in philosophies” and “player development” as some key buzz words.  Some kind of rift within the front office and clubhouse is a nice piece too.  Now one key to this step is to be ruthless.  Who cares if this guy brought in the superstars this team was built on over the last decade?  The players that got you a World Series trophy and a crap load of playoff appearances and individual awards may have been his idea, but you own them now.  His contribution is in the past right?  Exactly.  It is.  You catch on quick.  And as long as that GM doesn’t land on a team in your division you’re fine. 

Step 3:  Once that GM is gone, bring in someone who looks like he knows what he is doing, but really doesn’t, and then when his design fails, give him a contract extension.  He’ll need that extension because sometimes it takes a while to build a team.  I mean its not like he’ll be inheriting the greatest first basemen of his generation and a couple of the best pitchers in the league is it?  Patience.  You’ll want him to make horrendous signings that on paper look like improvements, but in reality totally surround your core players with minor league talent.  It also never hurts to massively overpay for players once in a while.  Besides, most fans will be ok with this if you won a championship in the recent past. 

 Step 4:  Get a new stadium built by promising a revival of the downtown area.  All you really need to do is tell the city that by building a new stadium the city will thrive with new bars, restaurants, and shops near the stadium.  People love the idea of having fun new things to do before and after the games.  It creates an illusion of inclusiveness with the team and the surrounding area.  Tell everyone you’ll undertake this huge development near your stadium and use that as part of the justification.  Then, once you get this new cathedral, just turn that area you planned on developing into a parking lot or something.  It’s your land after all; do what you want with it.  The fans and city won’t mind because they have a shiny new toy downtown.  Besides you can never have enough parking lots.  Trust us, people will forget all about this whole thing.

Step 5:  Keep Tony LaRussa as your manager as long as possible.  That guy is a genius.

 Follow these steps and you too can make sure that you’ll be playing golf in October and not wasting time with that whole playoff bullshit.  Besides, if you started with that strong franchise we mentioned, the fans won’t mind one bit, because after all, you can do no wrong in your city.

Oh, and it helps when no matter how badly you run your franchise, you’re still not the most poorly run pro sports team in your city.

Thanks!

The Saint Louis Cardinals

People, I am hard on the Cardinals lately.  Over the last several years I have become more and more disconnected with them and it has absolutely zero to do with wins and loses.  It doesn’t seem like the same model franchise we used to have in our city. 

A lot of people call it being a fair weather fan.  Those people are morons.  A fair weather fan is someone who only takes an interest in a team because of the success that team is having.  Guess what?  I have followed and loved this team since I was a child and I continue to follow them every day of the season.  It’s because I care so much and follow them so closely that I am so critical and disappointed.  And it’s not just championships I expect, its integrity, respect, and principle.  The St. Louis Cardinals don’t have those like they once did.  This franchise is not the Pirates or the Royals.  They’re the St. Louis Cardinals.  They’re Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, Ozzie Smith, Albert Pujols, Willie McGee, Chris Carpenter, Jack Buck, Mike Shannon.  They’re even So Taguchi, David Eckstein, or Woody Williams.  They’re Ozzie Smith left handed off of Tom Niedenfuer, Molina off of Aaron Heilman, or Gibson and 1.12.

This city, the fans, and this franchise all deserve better than what we’ve seen lately. 

Thanks for reading,

Mike