Shlensky v. Wrigley Case Brief Summary | Law Case Explained

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Shlensky v. Wrigley | 237 N.E.2d 776 (1968)

From 1908 to 2016, the Chicago Cubs were the lovable losers of Major League Baseball. They never once won the World Series. And according to the case of Shlensky versus Wrigley, playoff games weren’t the only things the Cubs lost; they squandered a whole lot of money too.

Philip K. Wrigley was an eighty-percent owner and president of the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Wrigley was also the owner of the Wrigley chewing gum company and a committed member of the Wrigleyville community that held the Cubs’ beloved stadium, known as Wrigley Field.

Mr. Wrigley was also a bit quirky. He refused to install lights at Wrigley Field. Long after every other team in the major leagues had put up lights to allow them to play games at night, Wrigley insisted on maintaining Wrigley Field as a purely daytime stadium.

By the late 1960s, Wrigley’s refusal to enter the age of electricity was costing the Cubs a lot of money. In the rest of the major leagues, the majority of weekday games were being played at night. And during the weekdays, night games got better attendance than daytime games. The result was that the Cubs had more people coming to their nighttime games on the road than their daytime games at home. Another major league team in Chicago, the White Sox, had better attendance than the Cubs, because the White Sox had lights and played at night.

As a result of Wrigley’s decision, the Cubs’ revenues began to drop like a fly ball to right field. Between 1961 and 1965, the Cubs’ profits declined and turned into significant losses.

William Shlensky, one of the Cubs’ minority shareholders, filed a shareholder derivative suit on behalf of the corporation, naming Wrigley and the corporation’s other directors as defendants. Shlensky alleged that by refusing to put up lights, Wrigley and the other directors breached their fiduciary duty. The trial court dismissed Shlensky’s suit, and Shlensky appealed.

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