ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo–Busch Stadium last hosted Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game in 2009, but a special facility set to rise in its image and spirit in South St. Louis County will host an All-Star Game of its own in 2025.

On Wednesday, the team and its charitable foundation Cardinals Care, along with the Gateway Region YMCA, Boniface Foundation, and Miracle League, celebrated the ceremonial start of construction on a new $5.2 million Adaptive Sports Complex on the campus of the South County YMCA at Tesson Ferry and Schuessler Road. 

Miracle League, formed in 2000, believes “Every Child Deserves A Chance to Play Baseball,” regardless of physical or mental disabilities. The organization will hold its 2025 All-Star Game at the new facility, which could be ready by fall of 2023. The project is still going through the St. Louis County planning process.

Talks started between the Cardinals and the YMCA in March of 2021. The Gateway Region YMCA serves roughly 1500 people with physical or developmental disabilities in camp settings and swimming, but was looking to expand. Soon the partnership expanded to include the Boniface Foundation.

Win Reed, Boniface’s Board Chairman, called it “a collision of good things.”

“The teamwork, the lessons you learn on a sporting field, and for those children not to have an opportunity to do that is really, it's really impactful in a negative way so this is a remarkable, remarkable thing,” he said. “People getting an opportunity to realize some of their dreams. The excitement of a hit, the excitement of the catch, and doing it in a way where they don't feel like they're being singled out, in a space that's built for them.”

The project, which will include touches familiar to Busch Stadium fans, including a cutout of the Arch in the outfield, will also feature an adaptive playground, a soccer field and running track.

The development comes as the YMCA has merged its Miracle League program with the one launched by Mike Matheny’s Catch 22 Foundation in Chesterfield in 2006, with support from Albert Pujols. The merged league’s fall season starts Saturday with 60 players lined up.

“When a kid comes out and they don't want to be there, all they want to do is sit in the dugout and their parents just forced them to be there...we get them up at the plate and there's no expectations. We follow what they want to do,” said Tom Nuetzel, of the Catch 22 Miracle League.

It's not like a regular game, so the expectation is that you do what you do and if it's just running the bases we'll just run the bases,” he said." It's not really about baseball, I don't think. It's about the engagement with the kid and baseball makes it fun…We have kids who are five years old and we have kids who are 30 years old and they're playing together.”

The fields organized by Cardinals Care have typically been named after Cardinals players and figures. Stan Musial, Lou Brock, Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina all have one bearing their names.

There’s still another spot in a different lineup for Albert Pujols.

“I would anticipate us doing similar what we've done in the past, staying with our trend and probably naming it after one of our players. Not sure who that is or who that will be but when we dedicate the field next year when they open, we'll probably have a name decided by then,” Michael Hall, VP of Community Relations and Cardinals Care’s Executive Director told Spectrum News. 

“Albert, he would definitely be in the running, but hard to say who it will be.”