Cardinals owners could get $380m in state cash by piggybacking on Royals’ stadium deal

If anyone was wondering when someone would notice that the St. Louis Cardinals owners could benefit from the stadium mega-subsidy bill that passed the Missouri senate last week, that shoe has now definitively dropped:

For more than a year, Cardinals ownership has been studying the needs of the stadium as it comes up on its 20th birthday next year. Now, a bill approved by the Missouri Senate could have the state cover half the cost of any project of more than $500 million.

“We weren’t going to leave the east side of the state out,” said Sen. Kurtis Gregory, the central Missouri Republican and former Mizzou lineman carrying the stadium bill. “I’m the guy that if the Royals don’t make the playoffs, I’m cheering for the Cardinals.”

Cool, cool. And never mind that the ostensible reason for giving the Kansas City Royals state money was that they (theoretically) might move to Kansas otherwise, while the Cardinals have no offer of juicy tax breaks to move to Illinois — it’s just fairness to give state cash to every MLB and NFL owner in sight, you understand.

Cardinals officials, who last year floated the idea of getting subsidies similar in scale to the Milwaukee Brewers ($500 million) and Baltimore Orioles ($600 million, for starters), aren’t saying if or how they would get those renovation costs up over the magic half-billion-dollar mark to be eligible for state funds, but I’m sure they’ll find a way: Potential needs identified by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch include new elevators, air-conditioning units, and club areas needing a “reset” so they can keep generating “outsized revenue” for the team, which is a pretty on-the-nose way of confirming our book’s subtitle.

And while the minimum subsidy to Cardinals renovations would be $250 million, the maximum could be much higher: The team reported paying $25 million in state taxes in 2022, all of which they would be able to reclaim to use toward stadium improvements. That would be enough to cover around $380 million in renovation costs — almost as much it cost to build the Cardinals’ stadium in the first place. Quick, somebody go figure out a way to buy $760 million in air conditioners, Missouri taxpayers are buying!