BBBLEACHER BOUND

Eleven Titles, Three Ballparks, One Name: Busch Stadium History

The deepest trophy case in the National League

Eleven World Series titles: 1926, 1931, 1934, 1942, 1944, 1946, 1964, 1967, 1982, 2006, and 2011. That is the most of any National League franchise. Only the Yankees have more. The Cardinals have also won 19 pennants.

Look at the spacing of those years. This is not a franchise with one golden era and a long tail of nostalgia. The Cardinals won in the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2000s, and two of those eleven flags were clinched on the field you can see today. The building opened in 2006 and had a World Series banner before its first birthday. The other nine titles belong to ballparks that stood within a couple miles of it, two of which shared its name.

Three ballparks, one name

The Cardinals played at Sportsman’s Park on the city’s north side from 1920 through early 1966, and for the first three decades they were tenants there. The St. Louis Browns of the American League owned the place. When Anheuser-Busch bought the team in 1953, Gussie Busch bought the ballpark too and wanted to rename it Budweiser Stadium. The league balked at naming a park for a beer, so he named it for his family instead, and the brewery introduced Busch Bavarian beer two years later. A St. Louis ballpark has carried the Busch name ever since.

Busch Memorial Stadium opened downtown in May 1966, a round multipurpose concrete bowl of the kind every city was building at the time. Locals called that generation of stadiums donuts, and this was one of them, shared with the NFL’s football Cardinals for two decades. It held the baseball team for 40 seasons.

The beer company no longer owns the team, and the name survived anyway. Anheuser-Busch sold the Cardinals in 1996 to an investor group led by Bill DeWitt Jr., whose family still runs the club. The current Busch Stadium opened in April 2006, built partly on the footprint of the old one, with the name continuing under a naming arrangement with Anheuser-Busch. Three ballparks, one name, over 70 years and counting.

From Alexander to the Streetcar Series

The first title came in 1926, and it turned on one of the most famous strikeouts ever thrown. Grover Cleveland Alexander, 39 years old and one day removed from a complete-game win in Game 6, came out of the bullpen in the seventh inning of Game 7 at Yankee Stadium and struck out Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded to protect a one-run lead. The Cardinals held on and beat the Yankees.

The 1934 club is the one with the best nickname in franchise history: the Gashouse Gang, a scrappy, dirt-caked roster fronted by Dizzy Dean. Dean won 30 games that season, still the last National League pitcher to do it, and he and his brother Paul won all four games of the World Series against Detroit.

Then Stan Musial arrived, and the Cardinals won the World Series in 1942, 1944, and 1946. Three titles in Musial’s first five seasons. The 1944 Series never left the neighborhood: the Cardinals played the Browns, their own landlords, with every game at Sportsman’s Park. St. Louis called it the Streetcar Series. The Cardinals won in six.

Gibson’s decade

Bob Gibson carried the 1960s. In 1964 the Cardinals beat the Yankees in seven games, with Gibson winning Games 5 and 7 and taking Series MVP. In 1967 he beat Boston three times, all complete games, and won the MVP again.

The 1968 rematch with Detroit went the other way. Gibson struck out 17 in Game 1, still the World Series single-game record, but the Tigers took Game 7 at Busch Memorial. That season, the year of Gibson’s 1.12 ERA, is a big part of why MLB lowered the mound the following winter.

Whiteyball and Big Mac

Whitey Herzog built the 1982 champions to fit the building. Busch Memorial had artificial turf and deep alleys, so Herzog loaded the roster with speed and defense instead of power. Ozzie Smith at shortstop was the signature piece. The style got its own name, Whiteyball, and it beat Milwaukee in seven games for title number nine. The same formula won pennants in 1985 and 1987. Both of those Series went seven games, and both ended in losses.

The other Busch Memorial moment that carried into the new park is Mark McGwire’s 1998. He hit his 62nd home run there on September 8, 1998, breaking Roger Maris’s single-season record on the way to 70. The left-field seats he kept reaching were branded Big Mac Land, and the name moved into the current park, where it still marks a second-deck section in left. McGwire admitted in 2010 that he used steroids during those years. The chase and what it meant to that summer in St. Louis are still part of this franchise’s story, told with that fact attached.

A championship in year one

The current park opened with a 6-4 win over Milwaukee on April 10, 2006. Every home date that season sold out, more than 3.4 million fans through the gates.

The roster that moved in was mid-decade Cardinals at full strength: Albert Pujols in his prime, a three-time MVP across his St. Louis years, on a club that had won 105 games and a pennant in 2004 before Boston swept that Series. The 2006 team went a modest 83-78 in the regular season, then won 11 postseason games. On October 27, 2006, the Cardinals beat Detroit in Game 5 to clinch the World Series at home. Title number ten, in the building’s first season. Most parks wait decades for their first championship night. This one needed about six months.

The Freese game

Game 6 of the 2011 World Series is the best night this building has seen, and it belongs on the short list for any building. The Cardinals had barely reached the postseason at all, taking the wild card on the season’s final day. Then, on October 27, 2011, they trailed Texas three games to two and were down to their final strike twice.

In the ninth, David Freese tripled off the right-field wall with two outs and two strikes to tie it. Texas went back ahead in the tenth, and Lance Berkman tied it again with a two-out, two-strike single. In the eleventh, Freese hit a walk-off home run onto the grass batter’s eye in center field. Cardinals 10, Rangers 9. The next night they won Game 7, 6-2, for title number eleven.

Both of the new park’s championships were clinched on this field. And the Freese game fell on October 27, five years to the day after the 2006 clincher. The core of that team won one more pennant in 2013 before Boston took the Series in six.

The statues at 8th and Clark

Stan Musial’s statue went up outside Busch Memorial in 1968, a 10-foot-8 bronze by sculptor Carl Mose on an 8.5-foot pedestal, funded in part by proceeds from a baseball writers’ dinner. The base carries Commissioner Ford Frick’s tribute: “Here stands baseball’s perfect warrior; here stands baseball’s perfect knight.” When the team moved, the statue moved. It was rededicated at the new park’s west entrance, outside Gate 3, on April 10, 2006, the same day as the first game, and it has been the city’s meetup spot ever since. “Meet me at Musial” is a complete set of directions in St. Louis.

Around the corner at 8th and Clark, outside the team store, runs a row of smaller bronzes by sculptor Harry Weber: Gibson, Lou Brock, Enos Slaughter, Red Schoendienst, Dizzy Dean, Rogers Hornsby, Ozzie Smith, and broadcaster Jack Buck among them. Two of the statues honor men who never wore the birds on the bat. Cool Papa Bell starred for the St. Louis Stars of the Negro Leagues, one of the great teams of the 1920s and 1930s. George Sisler was the greatest player in Browns history. The Cardinals shared Sportsman’s Park with the Browns for more than three decades, and the Stars won championships across town while both of them played there. The row remembers all of it.

Ted Simmons joined the group on July 31, 2021, the same day the team retired his number 23. His was the first statue added since the new park opened.

The slide and the rebuild

The franchise’s own standard is what makes the recent stretch stand out. The Cardinals went 71-91 in 2023, recovered to 83-79 in 2024, then fell right back to 71-91 in 2025. That last season came with the largest year-over-year attendance drop in baseball, from about 2.88 million fans to 2.25 million. John Mozeliak, who ran baseball operations for nearly two decades, handed the job to Chaim Bloom after the 2025 season. A market that filled this park by default for its entire existence started staying home, and the front office turned the roster over to a young core.

That young roster is the current chapter, and so far it has played better than the projections said it would. Whether this group grows into the twelfth title is the open question hanging over the building.