Benjamin Hochman Benjamin Hochman is a sports columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Follow Benjamin Hochman Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today

Did you see how many empty seats there were on Monday?

I was taken aback by the amount of empty seats — and even entire sections — at Busch Stadium. It's the last week of the season! Like, if there was ever a regular-season game to attend, it would be this, right? One of three against the team the Cards are currently set to play in the Wild Card Game? With a chance to overtake them and claim home-field advantage for that game?

Maybe another way of looking at it: What if I told you, on the day Mike Matheny got fired, that this would be the scenario in the final week of the season? And then I asked you: How many fans would you expect in attendance? You'd say a sellout, right?

The announced attendance was 36,508, this following a weekend of sellouts.

It was a Monday. School is back in session. And yes, it was a gloomy day in St. Louis — and there proved to be rain later in the night, as the Cards-Brewers game was delayed in the seventh.

Still, it was a weird image.

It's hard to lock down an exact reason for why the place wasn't packed. But there are surely suggestions to make.