Sports
Shaikin: In San Diego, an ownership dispute tests the belief of a great Padres fan base
SAN DIEGO — 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.
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.”
San Diego Padres general manager A.J. Preller gestures and smiles before a wild-card playoff game against the Atlanta Braves on Oct. 1.
(Gregory Bull / Associated Press)
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.
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.
San Diego Padres owner Peter Seidler speaks during a Padres Hall of Fame ceremony at Petco Park in July 2023. Seidler died in November 2023.
(Gregory Bull / Associated Press)
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.
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.
“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.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Oba Femi and Brock Lesnar’s feud will come to a head at SummerSlam in August, and the showdown has the potential to be WWE’s match of the year.
Femi beat Lesnar at WrestleMania 42 and led to “The Beast Incarnate” deciding to retire – at least for a moment – at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Lesnar made a dramatic return a few weeks later, challenging and beating Femi at Clash in Italy.
COMPLETE PRO WRESTLING COVERAGE ON FOX NEWS DIGITAL
Oba Femi looks on during Monday Night RAW at Allstate Arena on July 6, 2026, in Chicago, Illinois. (Melina Pizano/WWE via Getty Images)
At SummerSlam, Femi and Lesnar will do battle inside a Hell in a Cell.
WWE Hall of Famer John Bradshaw Layfield called the next meeting between Femi and Lesnar a “generational matchup.”
“I’ve never seen anything like Oba – well, I have. I’ve seen Brock,” he told Fox News Digital. “It’s very much the carbon copy of Brock coming in. Brock coming in was like, oh my God, who is this guy? The guy can even talk, and he’s gonna be one of the biggest stars in wrestling. Not only could he talk, he’s a really smart guy. Brock became one of the biggest draws in professional wrestling. He came one of the biggest draws in UFC. It’s an unbelievable story, and now you got somebody who can rival that character.
Brock Lesnar in action against Oba Femi during “Monday Night Raw” at TD Garden on March 23, 2026, in Boston, Massachusetts. (Michael Owens/WWE via Getty Images)
“This Oba Femi comes out with the silly little walk he does. Everyone kinda does it, it’s like The Bushwackers. But the whole arena does it. I was in Vegas and I didn’t want to go to the matches and deal with the traffic and deal with the backstage area, and so I kinda just watched it in a sports bar. I stood in the back where nobody could recognize me, and as soon as Oba came out, the entire sports bar was sitting there doing that Oba Femi dance. The guy is just unbelievably over.
“I really think that somewhere in the NFL this year, you’re going to see an entire NFL arena doing this dance. You’re gonna have somebody like Saquon Barkley or ‘King’ (Derrick Henry) or some of these guys do this dance, and it’s infectious. Once one of them does, one of these great running backs or wide receivers, or somebody scores a touchdown, that’s when I think you’re gonna see entire arenas doing it. I just think Oba Femi is lightning in a bottle and Brock has always been that way. This is, to me, a generational matchup.”
Brock Lesnar and Oba Femi face off during WrestleMania 42: Night 2 at Allegiant Stadium on April 19, 2026, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Georgiana Dallas/WWE via Getty Images)
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
SummerSlam will take place on Aug. 1 and 2 at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.
Sports
Commentary: ‘I don’t want any handouts.’ Amid the Angels’ drought, a starry homecoming for Mike Trout
Mike Trout last played in an All-Star Game seven years ago. It’s crazy, really. The best player of the previous decade, the link that ties Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols to Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, has not taken an All-Star at-bat this decade.
Injuries, mostly. And he turns 35 next month.
Next week’s All-Star Game takes place in Philadelphia, about 40 miles north of Trout’s hometown of Millville, N.J. Major League Baseball reserves a potential All-Star roster spot or two each summer for distinguished players: Bryce Harper and Justin Verlander this year, Clayton Kershaw last year, Pujols and Miguel Cabrera in past years.
That could have been Trout’s spot this summer: a worthy honor for a three-time most valuable player, a local hero feted on the national stage the Angels have failed to provide him.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” Trout said.
Not even at home?
“It’s an honor to get voted in and represent the American League,” he said. “For me, I don’t want any handouts.”
Trout is an All-Star for the 12th time, the old-fashioned way: He earned it.
Fans voted him into the starting lineup, with the most final-round votes of any AL outfielder. His peers voted him as one of the top three outfielders in the AL.
“It means a lot,” he said. “I’ve been through a lot of hurdles, a lot of adversity. I put some hard work in, and I did not let up. I could have easily got down on myself and not pushed through it and not come back.
“I know what I am capable of. I know I have the confidence to get back to the player I used to be.”
His .874 OPS entering play Thursday ranks second among AL outfielders, a career season for many players. In 11 of his 14 full seasons — all but the previous three — he has posted a higher OPS.
In April, in a four-game series against the New York Yankees, Trout hit five home runs and drove in nine runs.
“Everything was clicking,” he said. “When I first came up, that’s how I felt the whole season.
“Just to be able to get that feeling back, that little spark, to know it’s still in there, it makes you feel pretty good.”
For him, so does playing in Philadelphia. The first time he played there with the Angels, Millville basically closed down for the night, and just about everyone in town boarded a bus to the game. Then Trout had an exceptionally rare experience, a visiting player cheered at the home of the boo.
Mark Gubicza can testify to that. Gubicza, the two-time All-Star pitcher and now the Angels’ television analyst, grew up in Philadelphia.
“I don’t care if you were God himself, if you were wearing a different color uniform, I was still booing you,” Gubicza said. “But he was cheered.”
Still is. Trout is a diehard Philadelphia Eagles fan, with his season tickets not in some climate-controlled luxury suite but along the sideline.
“The players all walk by him and say ‘Trouty!’ ” Gubicza said. “Before they all go out to get their heads beat in, they’re all saying hi.
“He’s not one of those guys that comes there to be seen. He’s going there to root. That’s why they love him: He’s one of us.”
Said Trout: “I know how passionate I am about the Eagles. From my experience as an Eagles fan, it’s just different.
“It’s like win or die.”
It’s not like that in Southern California, where almost no one listens to sports-talk radio, and where a nice day is always a day away.
No one would begrudge Trout for living year-round along the Orange County coast. (OK, maybe Philadelphia fans would.)
Roy Hallenbeck, Trout’s high school coach, remembered visiting years ago on what he called “a perfect day” and asking Trout how he could ever get tired of all that sunshine.
“Yeah, coach, I couldn’t live here,” Trout told him. “‘I need my seasons.”
Trout built a family home near his boyhood home. He built his Trout National golf resort, with a course designed by Tiger Woods, in Millville.
He is as loyal to the Angels as he is to Millville. He appreciates the team that “took a chance on a kid from a little town in southern New Jersey” and signed him to two nine-figure contract extensions.
Trout was the last Angels player to take a postseason at-bat, in 2014. Even amid baseball’s longest playoff drought, he still considers Anaheim a special place, and always will.
“It’s where it all began,” Trout said. “I think the fuel of people doubting us kind of makes it more of a fire for me to try to get back to the playoffs. I think that’s the biggest key for me.
“Could I take the easy way out and just leave? Yeah. But I think — I said this last year around this time, but it’s the same feeling I’ve been having — I really haven’t sat down and talked to anybody about it specifically, but I know there’s a time where, if things change, who knows? I don’t know. But, for me, right now, my focus is on trying to get this club back in the playoffs.”
At the All-Star Game, Trout might well hear Phillies fans beseech him to come play for the home team. However, Hallenbeck said, the hometown folks no longer are as strident in that long-held wish.
“I think the overriding sentiment of most people I talk with, even Phillies fans, is we would all — as people that know him, love him and care for him — love to watch him play relevant baseball in August and September,” Hallenbeck said. “It doesn’t matter where. It doesn’t matter who. Just being relevant late in the season would be something we would all love to see.
“Hopefully, it’s with the Angels. They’ve been so good to him. We’d love to see it there.”
So would we. In the meantime, in the absence of a World Series, Trout deserves to enjoy his homecoming game.
Sports
London descends into disorder as Morocco fans flood streets after World Cup elimination by France
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Public unrest began in parts of London late Thursday night, and it appears Morocco’s exit from the 2026 FIFA World Cup at the hands of France is the reason.
France took down Morocco 2-0, eliminating the African country for the second consecutive tournament, this time in a quarterfinal match.
As a result, many feared Paris would erupt into riots, especially after the chaos that followed Paris Saint-Germain’s UEFA Champions League victory over Arsenal in May.
Instead, images and videos from Edgware Road in northwest London showed police clashing with large crowds as smoke billowed through the streets and debris littered the roadway.
A police vehicle is parked in a road as people from pro-Palestinian activist groups gather near the Edgware United Synagogue during a demonstration against the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” organized by real-estate agency My Home in Israel, which markets property in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, in London, Britain, June 14, 2026. (Toby Shepheard)
Riot police, equipped with shields and body armor, tried to contain the crowds as they clashed with people launching fireworks and throwing debris. One video also appeared to show an officer down.
KYLIAN MBAPPÉ, OUSMANE DEMBÉLÉ FIRE FRANCE INTO WORLD CUP SEMIFINALS WITH WIN OVER MOROCCO
It’s unknown what happened to the officer who was down on the asphalt or how he was injured.
Fans waved Moroccan flags in the middle of the streets, which held up traffic. Some even jumped on top of vehicles trying to get through the area.
Moroccan fans in the stands before a FIFA World Cup 2026 quarterfinal match between France and Morocco at Boston Stadium July 9, 2026, in Foxborough, Mass. (Richard Sellers/SportsphotoAllstar)
Similar scenes unfolded after Egypt’s World Cup exit, when Argentina rallied for a controversial 3-2 victory that featured several disputed officiating decisions.
Paris, on the other hand, looked more like a city celebrating than one on the brink of a riot. Supporters of both France and Morocco flooded the streets, slowing traffic in several parts of the city.
One video showed horns blasting from cars with French and Moroccan flags out the windows on the L’avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Supporters on the side of the road, waving their own flags, joined in on the celebration.
France’s Kylian Mbappé scored his eighth goal of this World Cup, which ties him for the most with Argentina’s Lionel Messi. Ousmane Dembélé also scored in the second half for France in the 2-0 win over Morocco.
It’s the third straight semifinal appearance for France, while Morocco still made World Cup history despite the loss. After becoming the first African country to reach the quarterfinals and semifinals in World Cup history in 2022, Morocco added to that by becoming the first-ever African nation to reach more than one quarterfinal.
Moroccan fans react while attending a watch party for the World Cup round of 8 match between France and Morocco in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 9, 2026. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP)
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Morocco’s exit means there are no more African nations alive in the World Cup. France will be taking on the winner of Spain and Belgium, while England and Norway and Argentina and Switzerland face off in the quarterfinals.
Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
-
Austin, TX5 minutes agoTexas Has One Trait Almost Every National Champion Shares
-
Alabama12 minutes agoFinal 2026 MLB mock draft projections for Alabama’s Justin Lebron
-
Alaska15 minutes agoWatch My Buddy Matt Not Get Eaten by Bears in Alaska
-
Arizona20 minutes agoRoller derby still has a home in Arizona despite myriad obstacles
-
Arkansas27 minutes agoFreshman OL Tucker Young never wavered through Arkansas football coaching changes | Whole Hog Sports
-
California30 minutes agoNorthern California high school graduation shooting suspect arrested in Texas
-
Colorado35 minutes agoColorado to weigh daily hunting limits, ban on fur sales for wildlife hunted for fur
-
Connecticut42 minutes agoWoman arrested, accused of murdering man in Farmington in March
