Sheel Seidler, wife of late Padres owner, sues in-laws for control of the team

The wife of late San Diego Padres owner Peter Seidler, Sheel Seidler, sued brothers-in-law Matthew and Robert on Monday, attempting to prevent another brother, John, from taking control of the team rather than her.

The suit comes at a time when the Padres are among the teams recruiting Japanese pitcher Roki Sasaki.

In a petition filed in Travis County Probate Court in Austin, Texas, Sheel Seidler sued Matthew, who became executor of Peter Seidler's estate last year, and Robert, the prior executor. She claimed fiduciary breaches of trust, fraud, conversion and egregious acts of self-dealing.

The petition accused Robert’s wife Alecia of making “multiple racist, profane and hateful communications directed at Sheel — a woman of lndian descent.”

“Defendants’ actions to wrest control of the Padres were undertaken to force Sheel — a women, an interloper and an Indian-American woman not of O’Malley descent — from what Bob and Matt saw as their family business and ancestral right,” the petition claimed.

Sheel asked that Matthew be enjoined from acting on behalf of the Seidler trusts and be removed as trustee. She asked the court to void any actions to appoint anyone other than Sheel as the Padres’ control person.

“I made this decision as a very last resort, but I am confident it is the right one and the best way to protect the Padres franchise and ensure the vision that Peter and I shared for the team will continue,” Sheel said in a statement.

The Peter Seidler Trust issued a statement calling the suit “entirely without merit.”

“Peter had a clear estate plan,” the statement said. “The plan specifically named three of his nine siblings, with whom he had worked closely for many decades, as successor trustees of his trust and Peter himself prohibited Sheel from ever serving as trustee.”

Peter Seidler, a grandson of late Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley, was an investor in the group that took over the Padres in 2012. He replaced Ron Fowler as the team's control person on Nov. 18, 2020, and died at age 63 on Nov. 14, 2023. Three days later, the team appointed Eric Kutsenda, a Peter Seidler business partner, as interim control person.

San Diego said on Dec. 21 that John will become the control person, a move that Major League Baseball owners have not yet approved.

“Matt has attempted to intimidate Sheel into silence, threatening her if she were to make public her opposition to John’s unwarranted nomination as control person,” the petition said.

San Diego, which has never won a World Series title, reduced major league player payroll from a team record $257 million in 2023 to $166 million at the start of the 2024 season.

“The emphasis in the press reports on the Padres cutting salary, lowering their expectations, and implicitly abandoning their all-out pursuit of a World Series championship would have been a gut-punch to Peter,” the petition said.

The petition included a piece of paper purported to be in Peter Seidler's handwriting listing Sheel followed by their children as his preference for future control person. The petition quotes Matthew as telling Sheel in a letter last Oct. 15 that she lacks “the experience, skills and financial acumen necessary to fulfill the responsibilities of this important role.”

“Rather than appoint Sheel as Padres control person — consistent with Peter’s noted preference and as the person whose interests are best aligned with the Seidler trusts — defendants are attempting to force the appointment of their brother John as the Padres control person," the petition alleged.

“By doing so, they are placing control of the Padres and the Seidler trusts’ substantial interests in the hands of a third party and enjoying the appearance and benefits of being principal owners. Meanwhile, defendants have frozen Sheel out of the Padres organization and deprived her of the benefits of being the largest beneficial owner of the baseball team, while themselves enjoying those benefits.”

The trust statement said “the trustee is exclusively responsible for designating the San Diego Padres’ next control person” and added “in 2020, in connection with Peter’s appointment as control person, Sheel agreed in a sworn document that she had no right to be or to designate the control person and that she would not interfere with the designated control person.”

She accused Matthew and Robert of attempting to sell the trusts' interests in Seidler Kutsenda Management Co. at below market value and then rescinding the sale when the attempt became known.

"Alecia made clear that Sheel was an outsider unworthy of being part of the Seidler family and that she was foolish to believe that the Seidler family would ever act in her best interests,” the petition alleged.

The petition also said Robert and Matthew “made clear that Sheel and her children are not welcome in the owners' box at the Padres' stadium, Petco Park.”

MLB declined comment.

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FILE - San Diego Padres Chairman Peter Seidler speaks at a news conference to announce finalizing a contract with Xander Bogaerts, Friday, Dec. 9, 2022, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Denis Poroy, File)

President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would move to try to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” a name he said has a “beautiful ring to it.”

It's his latest suggestion to redraw the map of the Western Hemisphere. Trump has repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st State,” demanded that Denmark consider ceding Greenland, and called for Panama to return the Panama Canal.

Here's a look at his comment and what goes into a name.

Since his first run for the White House in 2016, Trump has repeatedly clashed with Mexico over a number of issues, including border security and the imposition of tariffs on imported goods. He vowed then to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it. The U.S. ultimately constructed or refurbished about 450 miles of wall during his first term.

The Gulf of Mexico is often referred to as the United States' “Third Coast” due to its coastline across five southeastern states. Mexicans use a Spanish version of the same name for the gulf: “El Golfo de México.”

Americans and Mexicans diverge on what to call another key body of water, the river that forms the border between Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. Americans call it the Rio Grande; Mexicans call it the Rio Bravo.

Maybe, but it's not a unilateral decision, and other countries don't have to go along.

The International Hydrographic Organization — of which both the United States and Mexico are members — works to ensure all the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted uniformly, and also names some of them. There are instances where countries refer to the same body of water or landmark by different names in their own documentation.

It can be easier when a landmark or body of water is within a country's boundaries. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama approved an order from the Department of Interior to rename Mount McKinley — the highest peak in North America — to Denali, a move that Trump has also said he wants to reverse.

Just after Trump's comments on Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said during an interview with podcaster Benny Johnson that she would direct her staff to draft legislation to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, a move she said would take care of funding for new maps and administrative policy materials throughout the federal government.

The body of water has been depicted with that name for more than four centuries, an original determination believed to have been taken from a Native American city of “Mexico.”

Yes. In 2012, a member of the Mississippi Legislature proposed a bill to rename portions of the gulf that touch that state's beaches “Gulf of America,” a move the bill author later referred to as a “joke.” That bill, which was referred to a committee, did not pass.

Two years earlier, comedian Stephen Colbert had joked on his show that, following the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it should be renamed “Gulf of America” because, "We broke it, we bought it.”

There's a long-running dispute over the name of the Sea of Japan among Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, with South Korea arguing that the current name wasn't commonly used until Korea was under Japanese rule. At an International Hydrographic Organization meeting in 2020, member states agreed on a plan to replace names with numerical identifiers and develop a new digital standard for modern geographic information systems.

The Persian Gulf has been widely known by that name since the 16th century, although usage of “Gulf” and “Arabian Gulf” is dominant in many countries in the Middle East. The government of Iran threatened to sue Google in 2012 over the company's decision not to label the body of water at all on its maps.

There have been other conversations about bodies of water, including from Trump’s 2016 opponent. According to materials revealed by WikiLeaks in a hack of her campaign chairman’s personal account, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013 told an audience that, by China’s logic that it claimed nearly the entirety of the South China Sea, then the U.S. after World War II could have labeled the Pacific Ocean the “American Sea.”

Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.

President-elect Donald Trump walks from the podium after a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)