It seemed like a beautiful day for a ballgame. So when I obtained a couple of tickets from a colleague, my wife and I headed toward The Diamond.

The evening sun cast a golden glow over the ballpark, which appeared even more devoid of fans than usual as we approached from Hermitage Road. As it turned out, the ballpark and parking lot were empty.

A downpour the night before had seeped beneath the infield tarp, making playing conditions unsafe. We were the victims of a clear-sky rainout -- call it a drainout.

This washout was the perfect metaphor for baseball in Richmond.

If post-game fireworks aren't part of the mix, we're not interested in watching the Richmond Braves make their final runs around the base path.

So far this season, the Braves are drawing 1,100 fewer fans than in 2007, when folks weren't exactly flocking to a 12,134-seat ballpark to see a championship team. At an all-time low average paid attendance of 3,875, the home team is last in the International League in attendance and similarly positioned in the hearts and minds of area residents.

Did you check out the fever chart in Thursday's paper on the team's attendance since 1985? Attendance has been in a free fall for much of the past decade. It's not the sort of chart you'd want at the foot of your hospital bed.

Early on this season, officials blamed wet weather for the slack attendance. It turns out ennui, not inclement weather, is keeping fans away in droves.

If anyone should bother to notice, the votes have been tabulated. When the Braves pack up the moving vans for Gwinnett County, Ga., Richmond will have the team it deserves.

More power to the local folks trying to attract a new team to Richmond, but they're clearly catering to a niche clientele. We need to face the reality that Richmond is a great place to participate in a 10K or a marathon but a lousy town for professional sports.

During the early 1970s, we had a basketball prodigy named Julius "Dr. J" Erving and tickets went begging. Nothing has happened since then to change the perception that we'd rather gaze at pyrotechnics in the sky than watch fireworks on the field of play.

The inertia of our public officials paired perfectly with local fan apathy. When the Richmond Coliseum opened, Richard Nixon was in his first term as president and Linwood Holton was governor. It hasn't been state of the art since the golden age of Afros, bell bottoms and platform shoes.

The Diamond has been crumbling before our eyes like a cheap cubic zirconia, but it has somehow gone without replacement or refurbishment, save an upgrade on a drainage system whose failure all but drowned the end of the Braves' 2004 season.

In typically passive fashion, we've decided there are higher civic priorities and better uses for our tax dollars than a new ballpark. But we can't blame Atlanta Braves' brass for throwing up their hands in frustration and making a backdoor deal to relocate their farm team to a suburb 45 minutes away.

We haven't made a compelling case that we deserve a team or even want one. Baseball in Richmond is flat-lining. Time to pull the plug. nb
Contact Michael Paul Williams at (804) 649-6815 or mwilliams@timesdispatch.com.