Fans say goodbye to Canada's last triple-A baseball team

More than 7,000 people turned out Monday to watch the Ottawa Lynx play what was likely the team's final nine innings before it is expected to move to the U.S.

The Lynx,the last remaining triple-A team in Canada, lost 8-5 to the Syracuse Chiefsat their home stadium in Ottawa before a crowd more than triple its average size of 1,923 this season.

The International League team is soon to become the Leigh Valley Iron Pigs of Allentown, Pa., but their move has not yet been officially announced and no ceremony marked the end of their 15-season run in Ottawa.

Still, fans such as Steve Usher were sadly convinced that the game was probably the team's last as the Ottawa Lynx.

"It's a great summer pastime, it's great family entertainment, it's inexpensive we don't realize what we're losing here," said Usher, who blamed the team's departure on lack of support from fellow Ottawa residents.

"Ottawa tends not to support their teams if they're not doing really well and I don't know if it's a malaise this city has or what the problem is. It's a shame, though."

Since debuting in 1993, the team has faced declining attendance, blamed in part on poor weather, a lack of parking at the stadium and the team's own poor performance. This year its first as a farm team for the themajor-league Philadelphia Phillies it finished last among the 14 teams in its league, with a record of 55-88.

Usher said he started attending games more frequently a few years ago, when it looked like the city might lose the teamthe wayEdmonton, Vancouver and Calgary lost their triple-A teams.

Red Willington,a longtime fan whorarely missed a game, said he wondered where all the other fans at Monday's gamehad beenfor the past several years, when the team struggled to fill the 10,000 seats at their city-owned stadium at Queensway and Riverside Drive.

"It's nice to see all these people come," he added. "They should have came before."

Fans sign petition

At Monday's game, thousands of fans signed a petition asking the city to maintain the stadium for baseball. The petition was expected to be sent to the mayor's office on Tuesday.

But Gordon Hendren, president of Charlton Strategic Research Inc., a Toronto-based firm that studies the business of sport, said Canadian participation in baseball fell 45 per cent in the nine years leading up to 2004-05.

Meanwhile participation in soccer jumped 19 per cent, and that has changed politicians' decisions about which sport to support.

"You're going to be thinking more about soccer than you're going to be thinking about baseball," Hendren said, adding that U.S. cities have been more aggressive in developing baseball clubs than Canadian ones.

In fact, the City of Ottawa has received a proposal to cover the Ottawa Lynx Stadium and put in two full-sized soccer fields.

Reports that the Ottawa Lynx were going to leave Ottawa surfaced five years ago, but their move drew much closer to reality in August 2006, when Pennsylvania businessmen Joseph Finley and Craig Stein became majority owners of the team. They said they planned to move the team in 2008 to Allentown, Pa., where a new $34-million stadium was to be built.