Yankees and Mets fans don’t often agree on baseball, but the coronavirus has brought them together to sue Major League Baseball to get their ticket money back.
A lawsuit was filed in a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against Major League Baseball, Commissioner Rob Manfred, and the 30 teams, by a pair of fans of the two New York teams. The suit was filed by Mets fan Matthew Ajzenman and Yankee’s booster Susan Terry-Bazer, according to the New York Post.
The fans allege that they lost a lot of money spent on tickets for games that have been canceled because of baseball’s shutdown in the face of the coronavirus. Ajzenman says he bought now useless tickets for 20 Mets games while Terry-Bazer said she lost the money she paid for six tickets for a canceled Yankees game that was supposed to have been played on May 9.
“Baseball fans are stuck with expensive and unusable tickets for unplayable games in the midst of this economic crisis,” the court filing said. “Under the pretext of `postponing’ games, at the directive of MLB, teams and ticket merchants are refusing to issue refunds for games which are not going to be played as scheduled — if ever.”
The pair note that they lost quite a bit of cash on the canceled games. Ajzenman says he is out $1,730 for his 20-game ticket plan while Terry-Bezer says she has lost $926 on her ticket purchase.
“The defendants continue to retain enormous profits from tickets sold for the 2020 MLB season at the expense of fans’ financial hardship,” the suit alleges.
The suit seeks full restitution for the canceled tickets, along with other demands such as a full accounting of how much money MLB and ticket sales agents such as StubHub have made on tickets for games that are now canceled.
The suit was filed in California because the pair allege that the defendants violated California’s Consumer Legal Remedies Act and Unfair Competition Law and of civil conspiracy.
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