A lone fan sits in the upper deck as he watched the Atlanta Braves play the Washington Nationals. Attendance at Washington's RFK Stadium has plummeted since the team's 2005 inception.

Washington ? Washington Nationals players notice it. Opponents do, too.

Attendance at Nationals home games has dropped by more than a third from Year 1 to Year 3, leaving thousands of empty yellow and burgundy seats night after night at 46,000-capacity RFK Stadium.

Even this past weekend’s interleague series against Baltimore, a city about a 45-minute drive away, drew a high of 30,661 fans on Saturday night. Friday night’s announced turnout of 22,375 was deemed “pathetic” by Orioles outfielder Jay Gibbons.

“If we were both in first place, it would be full. A lot of it has to do with winning and teams playing well,” Gibbons said. “When teams aren’t playing well, people aren’t going to come out.”

That’s the main factor pointed to by the Nationals, who never have made a secret of the fact that they’re undertaking a start-from-scratch overhaul. Payroll was pared from $63 million to $37 million, and some players are getting their first taste of the major leagues in 2007.

So while the Nationals went 7-3 on their just-concluded homestand, they now sport a 16-29 record, the worst in baseball.

“I can certainly understand it,” right fielder Austin Kearns said when asked about the smaller crowds. “It’s pretty well known that we’re building for the future here.”

Still, the slump in attendance has been dramatic, and doomsayers might wonder whether it reflects a lack of interest in baseball in the nation’s capital.

This is, after all, a town that twice lost major-league franchises: The original Washington Senators moved to Minnesota after the 1960 season, and the expansion Washington Senators left for Texas after the 1971 season.

“There’s not one worry about that from in this clubhouse,” Nationals catcher Brian Schneider said. “We’ve had some smaller crowds, but we know they care.”

There certainly was a lot of hoopla accompanying baseball’s return to Washington in 2005, when the Montreal Expos moved south and became the Nationals. The team averaged 33,728 spectators for 81 home games at RFK Stadium, with its upper-deck seats painted in Redskins colors.

But a bit of that buzz has dissipated. The average fell to 26,581 last season. And in 2007, it’s down to 22,044 – a 35 percent decline from 2005.

Washington ranks 25th of baseball’s 30 clubs in home attendance, ahead of only Tampa Bay, Florida, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Overall, attendance at major-league games around the country averaged 30,346 through Sunday, topped by the 45,521 drawn by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The team never drew a single announced crowd of under 20,000 in 2005, then had seven such turnouts in 2006. There already have been 11 barely a quarter of the way into 2007.

“Customers,” Nationals president Stan Kasten said, “are never wrong.”

He acknowledges the less-than-attractive states of his team and its stadium: RFK, which first opened in 1961, will be replaced next season by a 41,000-seat park being built along the Anacostia River.

“At that new stadium, the revenue is going to be crazy. And they’ve already said they’re going to expand the payroll and everything,” Schneider said. “There are going to be a lot of new people in the near future.”

He could have been talking about people on the roster – and, the team hopes, people in the stands.