Photo by Kevin H.

The Washington Nationals are playing some very good baseball these days. So good, in fact, that with three games left in its season — a season which most people, including this editor, wrote off as a wash from the get-go — the team appears to have a legitimate chance at finishing over .500, if they can take two of three against the Florida Marlins in the last series of the season. (The team will only play 161 games this season, after a game against Los Angeles was postponed twice earlier this month.)

That said, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, as the team has played better, attendance has responded. After bringing in over 100,000 people to Nationals Park during the last three games of the season, the Nationals topped 2 million fans for the year, boosting their per-game average attendance to 25,197 for the season. That’s more than two thousand extra fans per game than they had last season — a big turnaround from last season, when the team, en route to registering the lowest per game attendance average since the team moved to Washington, struggled to entice people to the ballpark for meaningless weekday games against other non-contenders.

Last year, I wrote that “the team could start winning on a more consistent basis — that would probably help reverse the attendance decline.” Huh, I guess I was on to something for once.