Tarps off trend turns ballparks into rowdy college-style parties

What began as a few shirtless fans in right field at Busch Stadium has become baseball’s loudest new marketing asset, a rowdy “Tarps Off” scene that is spilling from one park to another. Fans, mostly young men, take off their shirts, twirl them above their heads and then join in with soccer-like chants or singing, giving a sport often criticized for a thin in-stadium atmosphere a sudden jolt of noise.

The movement appears to have started Friday, May 16, 2026, when 17 players from a Stephen F. Austin State University club baseball team came to St. Louis after the Cardinals offered them tickets while they were in nearby Alton, Illinois, for the National Club Baseball Division II World Series. Their spontaneous shirt-waving in right field quickly pulled in dozens of others, then several hundred fans, and the home crowd rode the energy through a 5-4, 11-inning win over the Kansas City Royals. Local coverage identified Bryce Bradford and Caleb Cummings among the fans helping spark the scene.

The Cardinals did not treat the moment as a one-night novelty. Manager Oliver Marmol liked the atmosphere enough to buy tickets for the shirtless section for the next game, and the team later said he bought out the remaining tickets in the “Tarps Off” section for Saturday and Sunday against Kansas City so fans could recreate the same look and sound. Even Fredbird got in on it. Masyn Winn said, “It’s hard not to have fun when the fans are like that,” adding that the younger generation made the park feel more like a college atmosphere.

That formula has since traveled beyond Missouri. Similar outbreaks surfaced in Tampa Bay on Monday and Tuesday, in Detroit at Comerica Park on Tuesday night, in Philadelphia as the Reds and Phillies played in the rain, and in Seattle and Anaheim, California. In Seattle, Mariners fan Chad Bitzer said he joined because “everyone else was taking it off.”

Major League Baseball has little reason to push back. League attendance is up by roughly 1,000 fans per game compared with a year ago through Monday’s games, and if that pace holds, MLB could average 30,000 fans per game for the first time since 2016. For clubs, the appeal is obvious: louder stands, more social buzz and more people buying tickets and concessions. The harder question is how far teams will go in encouraging a party atmosphere without making the ballpark feel less welcoming to families and fans who want a different kind of night at the game.