Fans Take a Stand to Keep Season Seats at Dodger Stadium

For the last 24 Dodger baseball seasons, the Morenos and the LeJeunes have been baseball buddies.

The Moreno brothers have four choice seats behind first base on the loge level, and Pat LeJeune has the four seats immediately in front of them.

Now the Morenos and the LeJeunes are not buddies. Now they are two parties involved in a lawsuit over Dodger tickets, a legal battle that could affect other season-ticket holders. It also raises interesting legal and ethical questions.

Here’s the story:

When the Dodgers came to Los Angeles in 1958, Mike Moreno was one of the first 100 people to stand in line for season tickets at the Coliseum. So when the Dodgers moved into their own stadium two seasons later, Mike was eligible to buy eight choice season seats, which he did.

Mike owns Moreno Brothers, a fruit and vegetable brokerage doing business out of the L.A. wholesale market. Pat LeJeune has a similar business in the market. They sell the fruit and vegetables we buy in the supermarkets.

Pat and Mike were friends, and when Moreno decided he really didn’t need eight tickets, he asked LeJeune if he would like to buy four of the seats. LeJeune said sure.

And that’s the way it was for 24 years. Moreno Brothers would purchase the eight season tickets and Mike would then sell the front four seats to Pat, at face value.

Then the overripe fruit hit the fan, so to speak. Some time during this off-season, the Moreno Brothers informed LeJeune that they would be keeping all eight seats.

Mike Moreno has retired, and his son and grandsons run the show. The company has grown, added a couple of new divisions. The bigger the company, the more customers and business associates to be kept happy with Dodger tickets.

LeJeune decided that he isn’t going to take this sitting down, so to speak. He got a lawyer. The lawyer asked the Moreno Brothers to give LeJeune a couple of years’ notice before cutting him off, or to compensate him for the loss of the four tickets.

The Moreno Brothers’ lawyer, Nick Brestoff, drafted a reply.

“We said, ‘You gotta be kidding,’ ” Brestoff says.

That’s a legal term, I believe.

Philip Bartenetti, LeJeune’s attorney, maintains that his client, by faithfully purchasing the four tickets every year for 24 years, has an unwritten contract, sort of like a common-law marriage.

Bartenetti is seeking a preliminary injunction to force the Moreno Brothers to fork over those front four tickets.

Legal business is expensive.

Says Bartenetti: “It would cost about $5,500 (legal fees and court costs), but we’ve agreed to do it at 40%. We told him (LeJeune), ‘You’re getting screwed.’ ”

Another legal term. You know how those lawyers are, they love their legalese.

Bartenetti claims that his client and Mike Moreno are still friends, that it’s the third generation of Morenos, now rising to power in the company, who are making the power grab for those front four seats.

“We think the younger Turks are getting aggressive,” Bartenetti says.

Younger Turks will be younger Turks. But according to Bartenetti, they’re forgetting a principle of the fruit and vegetable world. The lawyer says LeJeune told him, “In the produce business we do everything on a handshake.”

What’s the Dodgers’ position in this? Simple. The seats are registered to the Moreno Brothers and the seat account is not transferable. The seats themselves, however, can be used or dispersed any way the Morenos see fit. The Dodgers can’t help LeJeune.

Similar problems have popped up at Dodger Stadium, but apparently this is the first such case to result in a court battle.

“We started hearing this type of thing in the ’74 World Series,” Leo Shulemson said. Leo has worked in the Dodger ticket office for 20 years. “All of a sudden people decided they didn’t know who their partners were.”

When the Dodgers first came to L.A., season tickets were something of a novelty. Now they are a precious commodity, like kegs of Plutonium, except that if you want a really good keg of Plutonium you can probably buy one.

The Dodgers limit season-ticket sales to 27,000. They had zero for sale the last two seasons. This season they had about 1,000 available, and they sold them quickly to fans on a waiting list. When seats do become available, they are seats out in East Nowhere, beyond the foul poles.

If you’ve sat behind first base for 24 seasons, moving to seats out beyond a foul pole--assuming you could even get tickets there --would be traumatic. From that far away you can’t even see the players spitting. You can hardly hear Lasorda.

A Superior Court judge will rule on the case a week from Wednesday.

“We need a judge who’s a baseball fan, who understands the unique character of baseball seats,” Bartenetti says.

How would I rule?

From what I’ve heard, I’d say LeJeune is being euchred out of his tickets. That’s a word I learned from Jack Kent Cooke, and it means getting shafted.

I would order the Moreno Brothers to sell the four tickets to LeJeune, just as they’ve been doing for 24 seasons.

If a handshake is good enough for the fruit biz, it should be good enough for a baseball ticket arrangement between fruit businessmen. Young Turks should honor deals made by old Turks. Let the young Turks sit in the bleachers.

I would also caution both the Morenos and the LeJeunes, and guests, to check carefully before sitting down at the ballpark. You never know when someone might accidentally leave some overripe fruit on your seat.