The long, sad history of big-league ball in D.C. goes back to 1901 and the original Washington Senators, who -- upon their transformation to the Minnesota Twins after the 1960 season -- were replaced immediately by the expansion Washington Senators, who lasted only eleven seasons before their transformation to the Texas Rangers.
Anyway, D.C. has lost two major-league teams because it isn't a baseball town -- and the numbers prove it. In the following graph I compare attendance for D.C.'s hapless teams with the American League teams of New York and Detroit (real baseball towns). (Relative attendance is the ratio of a team's home attendance for a season to the average for all major-league teams in the same season.) Even allowing for the fact that attendance tends to rise and fall with a team's success (or lack thereof), it's clear that the D.C. area has been, and remains, relatively cool to baseball:
Sources:Yes, the Washington Nationals (2005-07) seem to be doing better than the previous Washington teams. But that showing is unimpressive compared with the records of real baseball towns, and can be chalked up to the novelty of baseball's return to D.C. The novelty, in fact, lasted only a season; attendance in the Nats' second and third seasons slid back toward the norm for D.C..
Major-league attendance by year: http://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/attendance.htm. Team attendance by year: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/stadium.shtml. Team won-lost records by year: http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/AL.shtml.
The rate of attendance at Nationals' games has risen in 2008 -- as one might expect, given the team's new, costly, tax-funded stadium -- but it is below the pace of 2005. As the Nats inevitably rack up losing seasons, the stadium will become an empty cavern, and the taxpayers of D.C. (and perhaps the nation) will be left holding the bag for it.
