There's nothing like a 65-degree February day to help steer thoughts toward springtime and all that comes with it. For some of us, that includes baseball, and for those of us who work or live around the Center City, it's not difficult to imagine walking to a ballgame on a fine April night.

We like the idea of pro baseball in uptown Charlotte. But publicly financed baseball?

The Observer's Steve Harrison reported Wednesday that Charlotte officials have engaged in preliminary talks about helping the Charlotte Knights pay for a baseball stadium in uptown's Third Ward. City Council member James Mitchell, chair of the city's economic development committee, said the city might contribute between $6-11 million for the $50 million-ish stadium. Already, the county has contributed to the concept of the uptown Knights with a long ago, tentatively approved $8 million in infrastructure plus land for a Third Ward stadium. Now the city may double down with the public's money.

We get why that could be a good thing for Charlotte. Baseball could be another jewel for uptown to flash, another feature to tout when businesses and talent consider a move to Charlotte. There's the potential, too, that an uptown stadium could prompt economic development on the streets nearby.

The counterargument: A baseball stadium would be bustling only 100 or so days a year, optimistically, and developers may not build around a space-eater that's an empty shell the rest of the time. A 2004 study for the city concluded that a large park would encourage more residential and office development, which is what Third Ward needs.

More importantly, the Knights have thus far shown an inability to finance and sustain an uptown stadium. That's due in part to their fundraising efforts getting squeezed by the recession and stalled by several lawsuits from Charlotte attorney Jerry Reese, who continues to tilt at the windmill of Major League Baseball in Charlotte. The Knights also argue, correctly, that uptown will bring more fans than their stadium just over the border in Fort Mill. But as we've learned, attendance hopes are often far off from attendance reality, and Charlotte already has its share of publicly financed failures, including the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Even if baseball is more popular, it comes with a risk of being another boondoggle.

Last summer, after the Knights had failed to make real progress toward financing a stadium, the county granted the team another at-bat by extending an already sweet lease agreement into 2012. The team has until March to show that it has two top-tier sponsors, but we're hoping that we'll see more - financial documents that show the Knights can survive if the stadium costs more than projected, or if all those expected baseball fans don't show up. Because if the Knights can't survive, guess who will get the call to help?

What we have thus far is little evidence, from the team or from corporate Charlotte, that the Knights have the support they need to make baseball work amid the skyscrapers. If the franchise can do so, we'll be among those happily walking to Third Ward on spring and summer nights. But let's not rely on public dollars to ensure it happens.