Court Opinion

ID: 9406651
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-07-02 14:07:36.330461+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:20:31.610398
License: Public Domain

Supreme Court of Texas
                              ══════════
                               No. 21-0641
                              ══════════

         McLane Champions, LLC and R. Drayton McLane, Jr.,
                                Petitioners,

                                      v.

                    Houston Baseball Partners LLC,
                                Respondent

   ═══════════════════════════════════════
               On Petition for Review from the
     Court of Appeals for the Fourteenth District of Texas
   ═══════════════════════════════════════

         JUSTICE BLACKLOCK, dissenting.

         I agree with the Chief Justice that the TCPA applies, which
means that unlike the Court, I would reach the question of whether the
claims should be dismissed. They should, and I write separately on that
point.
         This lawsuit was filed in 2013, not long after a group of investors
led by Jim Crane bought the Houston Astros and the team’s share of an
affiliated TV network from Drayton McLane for approximately $615
million. The suit alleges that Mr. Crane and his investors were injured
when they purchased the Astros in 2011.
      Anyone who has followed the Astros over the last several years
could be forgiven for wondering why the courts are still entertaining the
notion that Mr. Crane and his investors are worse off for having bought
the team.    In 2013, however, the allegation may have sounded
plausible. The team was struggling on the field, and the new TV
network was in a financial tailspin. Perhaps the team’s new owners had
a genuine reason, in 2013, to regret the price they paid and to suspect
they had been defrauded. So they went to court with the intention of
proving that their purchase of the Astros caused them injury. They
asked the courts to require the defendants to remedy that injury, which
they alleged was the product of the defendants’ fraud.
      Lawsuits like this one tend to take a long time. And as time
passed, any suggestion that Mr. Crane or his investors were injured
when they purchased the Astros rapidly became less and less
plausible. The Astros made the playoffs in 2015 for the first time in ten
years, and in 2017 they won the franchise’s first World Series
Championship. They advanced to at least the American League
Championship Series in each of the next five years, including three more
trips to the World Series and one more World Series Championship.
      Today, the Houston Astros are one of the most consistently
successful franchises in American sports. Analysts estimate the team’s
value at $2.25 billion, nearly four times what the plaintiffs paid in
2011.1 Aside from any profit earned by the team’s owners during these

      1 See Mike Ozanian & Justin Teitelbaum, Baseball’s Most Valuable
Teams 2023: Price Tags Are Up 12% Despite Regional TV Woes, FORBES (Mar.
23, 2023), https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2023/03/23/baseballs-

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banner years, the appreciation in the team’s value alone has
considerably outpaced even the extraordinary appreciation of the stock
market over the same period. From today’s perspective, the allegation
that Mr. Crane and his investors suffered damages when they
purchased the Astros is difficult to take seriously. It may be that Mr.
Crane’s shrewd ownership decisions deserve some credit for the team’s
recent success, but that does not change the fact that the decision to buy
the team in 2011 for $615 million has turned out to be an enormous
success rather than a damaging failure.
      The plaintiffs’ briefing in this Court asserts that if not for the
alleged false representations by the sellers of the Astros in 2011, Mr.
Crane and his investors “would never have entered into” the deal to buy
the team. If that is true, then they should be thanking the defendants—
not suing them—for inducing them to go down a road that has led to so
much success. Fraudulent inducement is never a good thing, but it is
only actionable in court when it misleads the plaintiff to his detriment.
A party who benefits from having been fraudulently induced into
making a deal he otherwise would not have made has suffered no injury.
      A conventional judicial remedy for a transaction procured by
fraud is rescission of the deal. Fortune Prod. Co. v. Conoco, Inc., 52
S.W.3d 671, 676–77 (Tex. 2000). Surely Mr. Crane has no interest in
unwinding his purchase of the Astros by returning the team to its prior
owners in exchange for the $615 million he claims to regret having
paid—although I suspect Mr. McLane would gladly take that

most-valuable-teams-2023-price-tags-are-up-12-despite-regional-tv-woes/?sh=
65dad6f26501.

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deal. Instead of the conventional remedy of rescission, the plaintiffs’
theory of the case is that the courts should award them the difference
between what they paid for the Astros and what they claim they
“should” have paid—whatever that means.
      So this lawsuit asks the courts to intervene in a deal that has
turned out to be wildly successful for one side in order to make that deal
even more wildly successful for that side. But the courts are not—or at
least should not be—in the business of making a party’s successful
business deals even more successful. The courts are in the business of
remedying injuries. There is no longer any injury here, assuming there
ever was one, and this lawsuit should no longer exist.
      The courts have struggled to deal with this case in a timely
manner, but judicial dismissal is not the only way a lawsuit can end. A
party who may have had some reason to seek redress in 2013 need not
continue to press his claims when, over time, a deal that once looked like
a grave injury comes to look far more like a great victory.
      I respectfully dissent.

                                        James D. Blacklock
                                        Justice

OPINION FILED: June 30, 2023

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