They play beisbol in my county

Yesterday evening the groundbreaking ceremonies for the new minor league downtown stadium were held, just four blocks from my current housesitting gig. The stadium will be home field for the Winston-Salem Warthogs, who currently play their games at Ernie Shore Field.

Ernie Shore is a fine place to watch a baseball game, but apparently there's all this annoying grass where you could have seats, and it's not in the "right" part of town (although it's right across the street from where Wake Forest plays all its basketball games.) So the team owners convinced the county commissioners to fork over $12.5 million in tax incentives over the next 25 years and the city council to flat out pay $21 million in cash and another $8 million in tax incentives. Because we are losing "young professionals" and this will keep them in the city.

They hope.

I didn't go to the ceremony. I had a rehearsal and I also would have felt like a hypocrite since I did not support public financing of this stadium. I would like nothing more than to be proven wrong, but somehow I doubt this is going to be the key to revitalizing downtown. And I can think of a lot of other places the city and county could have spent their money, like affordable housing and health care, but nobody ever has fireworks to celebrate a new housing development.

Yes, we had fireworks. And I happened to be driving up the hill to the house when they started. And I happened to remember that I had my camera in the car. And despite everything, I am a sucker for fireworks.