On Wednesday, December 2, 2015, an amended complaint was filed in Indiana District Court by Stuart Williams, the owner of the Pennsylvania-based Washington Wild Things, against four defendants, claiming that they interfered with the independent baseball league’s planned expansion in 2014. The Wild Things are a member of the Frontier Professional Baseball League, which is composed of 13 teams operating mostly in the Midwest states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, and Indiana. The four named defendants include former owners and board members of two other teams in the League, the Rockford Aviators and the Joliet Slammers.
The amended complaint alleges that the league was composed of 13 teams throughout the 2014 and 2015 season, and in order to balance out the playing schedule, the league had to fund and operate a fourteenth “travel team.” Wanting to find a more permanent solution, the league sought permanent expansion of a new team, and elected Williams as the agent to spearhead finding new expansion options. Williams and the league settled on the city of Kokomo, Indiana, as the proposed site of a new team, and through the spring and summer of 2014, they negotiated with representatives of the city to finalize a lease agreement for construction of a new ballpark.
According to the complaint, however, the defendants went behind the league’s back and negotiated with Kokomo for their own benefit, which forced discussions with the league and the city to fall through and a member club of a rival baseball league to swoop in and secure the ballpark agreement. Allegedly, this rival team is owned, operated, and backed by the four defendants, and per the amended complaint, one of the defendants estimated that the value of the expansion team was $1 million at its conception.
Williams argues that the defendants owed a fiduciary duty to the Frontier League because, at the time of negotiations, they controlled two of its member clubs, and that they used confidential information gained through the operation of the league for their own personal benefit.
The derivative suit was originally filed in November of 2014, but was subsequently dismissed without prejudice on a ruling that the claims were based on potential opportunity and not actual fiduciary relationships. The amended complaint seeks an award of all costs associated with the travel team for 2015, compensation awards for plaintiffs for the fair-market value of the lost Kokomo opportunity, and the $50,000 expansion fee that would have been awarded each team had the deal gone through.