I have one specific reason for posting about this.
Astros owner Jim Crane and former Astros owner Drayton McLane agreed Friday morning to settle their long-running dispute over the 2012-13 collapse of the Comcast SportsNet Houston, one day into their trial before a 15-member jury panel in Harris County District Court.
“We’re moving on,” McLane said as he left the courtroom. He and his attorneys declined further comment, as did attorneys for Crane’s Houston Baseball Partners ownership group.
Both men thanked the jurors that had heard a single day of testimony before state District Judge Sonya Aston.
[…]
The details of the settlement were confidential.
Crane’s ownership group, which purchased the Astros and their 46.5% share in the Houston Regional Sports Network for $615 million from McLane in 2011, was seeking $440 million in damages from McLane stemming from the collapse of the network, which launched in the fall of 2012 and was forced into involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy less than a year later.
[…]
Crane’s ownership group filed the lawsuit in November 2013, accusing McLane of misleading them about the value and business prospects of Comcast SportsNet Houston, a partnership between the Astros, Rockets and Comcast that began airing Rockets games in 2012 and Astros games in 2013.
McLane filed a countersuit in 2016, accusing Crane’s group of decisions that led to the network’s demise in an effort to avoid paying an additional $25 million to him that was tied to the network’s financial performance.
The case drifted between state and federal courts for years before returning to state jurisdiction in 2019. Further delays resulted from McLane’s efforts to seek dismissal, which were rejected by the Texas Supreme Court in 2022.
Crane’s estimate of $440 million in damages was based on the Astros’ loss of their equity in the network, originally valued at $331.5 million but subsequently adjusted to $150 million in the final sales agreement. The team also lost $85 million in unpaid rights fees in 2013 plus bankruptcy settlement fees and partnership cash calls.
The network was purchased out of bankruptcy by DirecTV and AT&T and renamed Root Sports Southwest before being rebranded as AT&T SportsNet Southwest in 2017. AT&T in 2023 handed over control in 2023 to the Astros and Rockets, who now own and operate the network as Space City Home Network.
The Rockets were never a party to the lawsuit. Comcast and NBC Universal were sued along with McLane and McLane Champions, the corporation that owned the Astros from 1992 through 2011, but reached a confidential settlement with the Astros in 2022.
Far as I know, I have not written about this before. It’s a money dispute between rich guys, even with the Astros angle it’s not that interesting to me. Except that I was almost on the jury for this. I had been called for Harris County jury duty on July 15, and had to push it back for a week because of work stuff. On Tuesday the 22nd, I was one of one hundred people brought to the 80th Civil Court, and as soon as the lawyer for Jim Crane introduced himself and the client he represented, I had an idea of what we were in for. I did see the Chron story that had run the week before. Drayton McLane was there on day one (which, as it happens, was his 89th birthday), Jim Crane joined him on day two.
I was juror #34, and after the hardship people were dismissed on Tuesday, that was a low enough number that I could have been picked as we went through voir dire. That was kind of wild, as lead plaintiff attorney Ronald Franklin launched into what was basically an opening argument before he’d asked a single question. Defense attorney Paul Dobrowski objected something like six times, there were three or four conferences with the judge, all about what Franklin was saying when he wasn’t just asking us questions. You don’t see that on your televised courtroom dramas.
Anyway, after voir dire as the lawyers and judge conferred and we waited in the hall, I was called back in at one point and asked multiple questions about my blog. Someone on one of the teams googled me, as they should have. I told them that while I did occasionally write about baseball and the Astros it wasn’t my main beat and I had no intention of writing about this until it was all over. They did eventually pick three jurors with higher numbers than mine, so at least one side decided it was better to skip me. Given how long the trial was expected to take, I was fine with that. But now I kind of wish I’d been there for the one day it lasted.
So there you have it, a little bit of inside info about this case. Congrats to all for the settlement, and godspeed to the jurors who just got two weeks of their lives back.