Appeared in “The Wall Street Journal”
Frank McCourt’s tumultuous run with the Los Angeles Dodgers isn’t quite over.
After a battle in which he lost ownership of the team, he still faces a lawsuit in Los Angeles that asks, Just how responsible is a stadium operator for keeping fans safe? The case concerns an incident that contributed to Major League Baseball’s perception that Mr. McCourt shouldn’t be allowed to keep his team.
On March 31, 2011, devoted San Francisco Giants fan Bryan Stow decked himself out in his team’s colors and traveled with friends to Los Angeles for Opening Day against the Dodgers.
After a day of drinking and baseball, Mr. Stow and his friends found themselves trading insults with two Dodgers fans, Louie Sanchez and Marvin Norwood, according to documents filed in the case. A fight broke out in the Dodger Stadium parking lot and Mr. Sanchez allegedly punched Mr. Stow on the side of the head. Mr. Stow, a paramedic, fell, slamming his head on the pavement, according to the lawsuit and witness accounts.
Two years later, Mr. Stow can’t take more than a few steps on his own and has trouble speaking coherently, says Thomas Girardi, one of Mr. Stow’s lawyers.
Mr. Stow filed suit in May 2011 in state Superior Court against the Dodgers and several subsidiaries owned by Mr. McCourt, accusing them of negligence in their obligation to keep fans safe in and around the stadium. Mr. Stow is seeking compensation for his care and lost income.
“You have to take reasonable steps,” Mr. Girardi says, contending that the Dodgers security detail was too small. “This wasn’t the first incident that night. Those guys were fighting with people for 35 minutes,” he says of Messrs. Sanchez and Norwood.
Los Angeles police arrested Messrs. Sanchez and Norwood that July and charged them with assault. They pleaded not guilty, and a trial has been scheduled for this year. Their attorneys didn’t return phone calls seeking comment.
At the time of the beating, which received national attention, Mr. McCourt was battling Major League Baseball over control of his team. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig was angry that Mr. McCourt and his former wife had used team revenue to buy houses and support a lavish lifestyle.
To executives in the commissioner’s office, the Stow beating was the final straw for Mr. McCourt, whom they viewed as unfit to manage the team. After assessing the team’s operations, MLB seized control of the Dodgers on April 25, 2011.
Mr. Stow’s suit, which could go to trial as early as this summer, has unearthed conflicting assessments of Dodgers security.
Even as baseball executives were criticizing Mr. McCourt, MLB’s vice president for security, Earnell Lucas, circulated a report favorably comparing the Dodgers’ preparations with security at an All-Star or World Series game.
“The number of officers and security personnel that the Dodgers had for an Opening Day compliment [sic] might only be surpassed by the Yankees,” Mr. Lucas wrote to John McHale, baseball’s executive vice president for administration, in an email message that is in the court record. “There were no deficiencies.”
According to Mr. McCourt’s motion in June to dismiss the case, the Dodger Stadium security force on Opening Day included 195 uniformed on-duty police officers; 19 uniformed, off-duty police officers; “59 off-duty law-enforcement officers retained by the Dodgers in white polo shirts”; 124 private security guards; 21 security managers; five Los Angeles public-safety officers; two members of the California Highway Patrol and 17 employees from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There was one security officer for every 124 fans, his motion says, and more than 100 security workers and police officers were assigned to the parking lots before and after the game.
MLB spokesman Patrick Courtney says that Mr. Lucas’s email was merely a preliminary report on the police presence at the game.
“At the direction of the commissioner, MLB commenced a comprehensive analysis of all security and stadium operations procedures at Dodger Stadium due to the commissioner’s many concerns about the state of the Dodger franchise at that time,” Mr. Courtney says in a prepared statement. MLB isn’t a defendant in the case.
A spokesman for McCourt Global, a holding company for Mr. McCourt, declines to comment beyond the court record.
Michael Rowe, a former top executive at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in New Jersey who supervised security for thousands of events during the 1980s, and 1990s, says it is generally accepted among stadium operators that guaranteeing complete safety is impossible.
“If people want to misbehave they outnumber you,” says Mr. Rowe, who isn’t involved in the Stow litigation. “The word ‘fan’ derives from is from fanatic, and if someone wants to act that way and be irresponsible, you just can’t help them.”
But Mr. Girardi, Mr. Stow’s lawyer, says witness accounts suggest that the alleged assailants harassed other people during the game, as well, throwing peanuts, spraying soda and using profane language. That should have garnered attention from stadium security but the detail was too small, he says, considering the amount of alcohol consumption and the occasional fights that erupt at games.
Lawyers for Mr. McCourt in court papers cite several cases establishing that owners of property don’t necessarily guarantee safety. Assigning a security officer to ensure that each fan remained safe would be nearly impossible, they say.
Mr. Girardi says that argument will be a stretch with a jury.
“Once we show the other fights that have taken place and the total lack of security in the stadium, and lighting in the parking lots,” he says, “that’s not going to hold water.”
Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com