In 2009, as the couple that owned the Dodgers announced their separation, the attorney for Frank McCourt said he did not anticipate a legal battle over the team. The attorney said documents would prove the Dodgers were owned solely by McCourt, not jointly by the couple, and said there was “not a chance” the team would be put up for sale.
“Speculation about a potential sale of the team is rubbish,” attorney Marshall Grossman said then. “Frank McCourt is the sole owner. He has absolutely no intention of selling this team now or ever.”
The documents did not hold up in court. McCourt did sell the team — but not for another three years, a span in which the Dodgers did not make the playoffs, were outdrawn by the Angels for the first and only time, and were outspent one season by the Minnesota Twins.
On Saturday, as the Dodgers showed off their superstar-studded roster at Dodger Stadium, the Padres staged a fan festival of their own. The new year here started ominously: Sheel Seidler, the widow of beloved owner Peter Seidler, ignited a legal battle over whether she or one of Peter Seidler’s brothers should properly be running the Padres.
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The Padres set a franchise record for attendance last year and already have sold out of season tickets this year. They boasted what we thought was the second-best team in the major leagues last season, and on Saturday fans proudly wore the jerseys of the core of what remains a very good team: Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado; Jackson Merrill and Luis Arraez and Jake Cronenworth; Yu Darvish and Michael King and Dylan Cease.
And then there was the guy walking around the outfield in a Mookie Betts jersey. Gavyn Wolf lives here, so he came with his friends, dodging the jeering.
“I refuse to wear anything Padres,” he said.
So who’s going to win the National League West this season?
“Who else is taking it?” he said.
His friend, Jack Endicott, shrugged. He couldn’t disagree.
“The Padres haven’t made any moves,” he said.
The Dodgers brought back Teoscar Hernández and Blake Treinen and brought in Roki Sasaki and Blake Snell and Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates and Hyeseong Kim and Michael Conforto.
The Padres brought back their backup catcher.
“Are we disappointed we haven’t made any moves?” Machado said Saturday. “Yeah.”
Padres general manager A.J. Preller last winter traded Juan Soto for King, who brilliantly replaced Snell in the starting rotation after working as a swingman for the New York Yankees. Merrill jumped from double-A into the Padres’ outfield and should have won NL rookie of the year honors.
Preller said Saturday he wants to add a bat “or two” and a starting pitcher “or two.” And, by this time last year, the Padres had not added Arraez, Cease or Jurickson Profar, who was an All-Star outfielder.
Profar, who led the Padres with an .839 OPS last season, signed as a free agent with the Atlanta Braves. He said he was interested in returning to San Diego.
“Obviously the Padres have some issue with the ownership and all that,” Profar told reporters.
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That explained the trepidation in the air at Petco Park on Saturday. Good team, great fans, best ballpark in Southern California – but is an ownership dispute going to paralyze the franchise?
Two springs ago, I sat in the passenger seat of a golf cart at the Padres’ training complex in Peoria, Ariz. Peter Seidler sat in the driver’s seat.
He wanted to emphasize he was spending lavishly to build a foundation to challenge the Dodgers year in and year out, not to pump up the payroll and attendance and then sell the team.
“Myself and my family, we will own this franchise for the next 50, 75 years,” he told me, “hopefully more.”
When Frank and Jamie McCourt split up, they both insisted the Dodgers would stay in the family, no matter what else happened. Then the two torched one another in court rather than privately negotiate a settlement, and now the family no longer owns any part of the team.
In San Diego, the torching has begun.
In her initial court filing, Sheel Seidler accused the Seidler brothers of “greed and betrayal” by enriching themselves with money that should have been hers, of allegedly painting Peter as “a cowboy who was irresponsible with the Padres payroll,” and tolerating her only so long as Peter was alive.
“After Peter died, they took off their masks and showed their true faces,” her filing read.
In his initial filing, Matt Seidler — one of the brothers — blamed Sheel for “recklessly” torpedoing the Padres’ pursuit of Sasaki by baselessly suggesting the brothers might move the team from San Diego and ridiculed her desire to run the Padres because her business experience allegedly is limited to “a brief legal career and her operation of a single yoga studio.”
According to Matt Seidler’s filing, “The crux of this case is Sheel’s pursuit of two things that Peter intentionally chose not to give her: control and unlimited money.”
The longer this goes and uglier this gets, the less the chance of the Padres staying in the Seidler family, no matter who might control the team.
As a strong team with a terrific ballpark in a market with no other major league teams, the Padres would attract bidders. That would come later, perhaps years later. Until there is some resolution to the court case, potential bidders would not know who the legal seller might be.
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The Seidler brothers say this is not an issue. They have “no plans to sell the Padres to anyone,” according to a person familiar with their thinking who declined to be identified. They believe their documents will hold up in court.
In the Dodgers’ case, Jamie McCourt hired an investment banker to assemble a potential ownership group, in an effort to get Frank to sell her the team. In the end, Frank McCourt agreed to settle the divorce by paying Jamie $131 million, and she relinquished any claim to the Dodgers.
Frank McCourt then sold the team for $2 billion.
In her court filing, Sheel Seidler said she had assembled “an impressive roster of individuals with significant baseball and business experience to serve as advisors and executives” with the Padres and said she was concerned the brothers would sell the team.
So has she assembled a roster of financial backers to try to buy out the Seidler brothers? Dane Butswinkas, her counsel, declined to say.
“Ideally, we would like to resolve this with the brothers,” Butswinksas said. “However, for that to occur, it would take some level of cooperation from them. So far, we have seen no signs of that happening.
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“The current path towards resolution, unfortunately, is through litigation, which we know can drag on for years and would be in no one’s interest.”
When the McCourts divorced, the lawyer for Frank McCourt wanted to make one point perfectly clear. The contemporaneous divorce of Padres owner John Moores had left the team a mess — he had to sell the team to resolve the divorce — and the Dodgers would not be a mess.
“This is not going to be another San Diego-like debacle,” Grossman said.
Here’s hoping there is not going to be another San Diego-like debacle in San Diego. The best rivalry in baseball deserves better. The people who run the Padres every day, and the people who root for them every day, deserve better.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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