I think we’ve declared Uptown baseball dead and buried before, only to see crawl back from the brink more often than Rasputin. As a result, excuse me if I refrain from singing a ding-dong song.
The fact remains that there are powerful forces in town still who spend hundreds of man-hours each week trying to make the numbers work to get the Knights up from Ft. Mill. That has not changed, and will not change for the foreseeable future.
Has a county money squeeze — school-building money specifically — derailed the $9m. intended to pay for infrastructure on the site? Absolutely. But do not think for a minute that a new subsidy plan won’t appear just as soon as the current crisis has passed. The bigger stumbling block remains the $70m. or so cost of a stadium and the Knights’ manifest inability to secure financing for that amount. The whole point of this dipsy-do Uptown landswap was to remove the need for the Knights to pay property taxes on the land they occupy, thus allowing the team to finance a $34m. stadium.
