Ninety days ago, the San Diego Padres closed within one game of eliminating the Dodgers in the National League Division Series. On their march to the World Series championship, the Dodgers had survived their toughest test at the hands of the Padres. The best rivalry in baseball would endure.
On Monday, in a bombshell lawsuit, the widow of beloved Padres owner Peter Seidler suggested the Padres themselves might not endure, at least not in San Diego.
Sheel Seidler, the widow, wants to take control of the team and said in a court filing that a reason Seidler’s brothers have prevented her from doing so “may well be … efforts to sell, and perhaps relocate, the team, over Sheel’s strident objections.”
In a lawsuit filed in Travis County (Tex.) probate court, Sheel Seidler alleged two of his brothers have “misappropriated and misused” the assets of Peter Seidler, who died in 2023. She further alleged the brothers “treat the team as their own plaything to be passed back and forth on a whim.”
In a statement on social media Monday, Sheel Seidler said she filed suit “as a very last resort” and “the best way to protect the Padres franchise.”
A team spokesman said the Padres “do not comment on pending legal matters.”
However, a spokesman for the Peter Seidler Trust said in a statement the lawsuit was “entirely without merit.”
Peter Seidler, a nephew of former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley, reinvented the Padres as a powerhouse unwilling to be defined by its small market. The star-studded Padres, featuring the likes of Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Yu Darvish, sold out two-thirds of their home games last season and sold more tickets than any team besides the Dodgers, New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies.
In 2023-24, the first winter after Peter Seidler’s death, the Padres traded Juan Soto and abandoned Blake Snell and Josh Hader in free agency. This winter, the Padres have not signed a major league free agent from outside the organization.
Last month, the Padres announced that Peter’s older brother, John, would become the team’s controlling owner. In a statement, the team described John Seidler as “an accomplished entrepreneur and business executive.” John Seidler is not one of the two brothers named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
In the suit, Sheel Seidler said John Seidler is a civil engineer with “no ties to the San Diego community” and no ties to the Padres beyond a small ownership stake that Peter Seidler “enabled him to acquire” and a son who worked as a team photographer.
She alleged the two brothers serving as trustees for the Seidler assets are “trying to erase Peter’s vision and legacy, as well as falsely cast themselves as Peter’s true heirs.”
She added: “The emphasis in the press reports on the Padres cutting salary, lowering their expectations, and implicitly abandoning their all-out pursuit of a World Series championship would have been a gut punch to Peter.”
According to the statement from the Peter Seidler Trust, Sheel Seidler said last May that John Seidler would be “the best” controlling owner for the Padres. The trustees decide on the controlling owner, and “Peter himself prohibited Sheel from ever serving as trustee.”
In 2020, according to the statement, Sheel Seidler “agreed in a sworn document that she had no right to be or to designate” the controlling owner.
The statement added that “John Seidler shares Peter’s vision for the Padres” and concluded: “We look forward to pursuing the franchise’s first World Series title.”
Sheel Seidler claimed that the wife of one of the brothers had made racist comments about her. She alleged the brothers’ “actions to wrest control of the Padres were undertaken to force Sheel — a woman, an interloper, and an Indian American woman not of O’Malley descent from what [those brothers] saw as their family business and ancestral right.”
If the lawsuit proceeds to trial, the outcome would turn on whether a court finds the two brothers named as defendants properly and fairly carried out Peter Seidler’s wishes and carried out their duties with financial integrity.
Sheel Seidler cited numerous instances of her involvement with the Padres — including meetings with agent Scott Boras — and claimed Peter Seidler had said before his death that he wanted his wife to run the team. Even if the lawsuit is settled or otherwise resolved without a trial, a high-profile family feud could distract fans and management for months or years.
In her filing Monday, Sheel Seidler cited no evidence of any plans to sell the team, or to move it out of San Diego. Still, in a city that had its heart torn out by the Chargers moving to Los Angeles, Peter Seidler put together an organization that made it possible for San Diego to love big-time sports once again.
For now, though, we have to wonder whether the Padres’ Camelot era might have ended 90 days ago.
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