Add Ticket Spats to Sign Dispute Sparked By Chicago Cubs' Success
As fans of the Chicago Cubs eagerly await the playoffs and the team’s possible participation in baseball’s World Series, the situation is testing once-amicable sharing arrangements among groups of season-ticket holders.
A lawsuit was filed yesterday in Illinois state court by two business partners who claim an 84-year-old fan reneged on his oral promise to let them use his postseason tickets, too, if the team had a good year, reports the Chicago Tribune. Plaintiffs Laurence Wright and Brad Ginsberg paid $15,000 for four regular-season tickets in the first row of the upper deck.
The defendant, Jerry Slavin, says there was no such deal, the newspaper reports. A fan since he began attending games with his dad, when he was five years old, Slavin says he couldn’t afford to go to the 1945 World Series because he was a newlywed then.
Others are unhappy with sharing arrangements, too: Eric Berkland of Chicago says the group of four college roommates with whom he splits three seats during the season have created a postseason rotation. But he will be getting married when the World Series is held, and has to decide what to do with his ticket, the Tribune recounts. He could simply give it to the odd man out, sell it and keep the huge amount of money he’s likely to make, or sell it and use the money to help buy the group’s season tickets next year.
“It’s the elephant in the corner that no one is talking about,” he tells the newspaper. “Looking back on it, I wish we would have written some bylaws.”
Meanwhile, in another court case apparently heated up by the team’s National League central division win this year, a judge issued a temporary restraining order late last week allowing Anheuser-Busch to remove the brown cover that the owner of a multi-unit building just beyond left field at the team’s home stadium had put over an iconic Budweiser beer advertisement, the Tribune reports in an earlier article.
As discussed in a previous ABAJournal.com post, the building’s new owner and the beermaker are involved in a lease dispute over what the newspaper describes as the “Budweiser Building” next to Wrigley Field.
