Interesting WSj article extolling the virtues of Cardinaldom.
“You go to St. Louis and walk onto the field and you can just feel how much the people care,” Peralta said last week, as the Cardinals closed in on a third consecutive Central Division pennant. “I knew if I came here, I was going to feel better and better and better.”
Cardinal Nation may be the only major market where the baseball team trumps all other sports. Here, even the yoga instructors wear Cardinals jerseys. The players work in a love bubble.
“It’s an easy place to play,” says General Manager John Mozeliak. He cites the city’s combination of attendance of three million-plus, high TV ratings, a comfortably medium-size local media contingent, short flights to most opponents’ stadiums, and a high quality of life.
The Cardinals, who must manage the budget constraints of baseball’s 19th-largest market, are as good as anyone at finding undervalued players on other teams and knowing when they have squeezed the maximum productivity out of even the best players on their roster. Mozeliak’s instinct for knowing when to cut loose the most beloved Redbirds when price exceeds value— Albert Pujols, 2011 World Series most valuable player David Freese—is legendary.
There are some 75 Cardinals alumni who didn't grow up in the St. Louis area but have chosen to live their post-baseball lives there, including Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith.
Even though the population of greater St. Louis is just 2.8 million, the Cardinals have drawn at least 3.1 million fans every year since the new Busch Stadium opened in 2006. Since then, the Cardinals have won two World Series and three National League pennants and have made the playoffs seven times, including each of the past five years. The past two seasons the Cardinals drew more than 3.5 million fans, with average crowds that were 99% of capacity, and a completely unscientific estimation found that roughly 99% of those fans wore red when they attended the game. Moreover, the Cards are the only team in baseball to finish in the top three in local-TV audience share in each of the last 10 years.
All the love and attention seem to consistently improve performance. Take Peralta. The stat baseball nerds favor most these days is Wins-Above-Replacement value, because it cleanly and analytically measures how much better a player is than a generic, entry-level substitute. Peralta’s WAR number jumped to 5.7 in 2014, the highest of his career, when he joined the Cards (a WAR of 5.7 means that the Cardinals were 5.7 wins better than they would have been if the team had to replace him with a generic player added for minimal cost).
During the last 10 years, 40 players have either had 500 plate appearances or pitched 100 innings for the Cardinals before moving to another team. For 27 of them, or about two-thirds, the level of performance dropped after they left, measured once again by WAR. The pattern holds for superstars such as Pujols, and also-rans, like former shortstop David Eckstein.
Sports psychologists say Lackey and his teammates are benefiting from a phenomenon known as “social facilitation,” which is a person’s awareness and response to being observed by someone who appears to care about what they are doing. In one of the landmark studies in the field from 1983, 36 college-age runners were timed while running two, 45-yard segments of a path. Only runners who were observed by someone ran the second segment faster.