Having lived in San Diego, it gave me a sense of deja-vu as the Petco Park version of this story is instructive precisely because there isn’t one. No lawsuit, no “parasitic” language, no summary judgment briefs. San Diego solved the sightline problem before it became a legal problem, and the difference in approach tells you almost everything about timing and ownership structure.
Wrigley inherited the rooftops. Petco built around them from day one.
Wrigley Field opened in 1914, decades before anyone thought to sell tickets for a view of the field from a neighboring roof. By the time the Cubs got serious about monetizing that sightline as their own property, the rooftop businesses already existed, had customers and had built a case that the city itself had licensed their operation. The Cubs are now suing to claw back a right they never controlled to begin with.
Petco opened in 2004. The Padres and the city designed the ballpark’s surroundings as a single real estate project, not a stadium dropped into an existing neighborhood. That gave them a move the Cubs never had: buy the sightline before anyone else can sell it.
The Western Metal Supply Co. building is the tell.
Instead of demolishing the 1909 building anchoring left field, the Padres kept it and made it theirs. The team store sits on the ground floor. Party suites and a restaurant sit above it. The roof, the exact vantage point that would have become San Diego’s version of a rooftop bleacher business, is a Padres-operated venue with Padres-priced tickets. There is no third party to sue because there is no third party. The team vertically integrated the one piece of adjacent real estate that mattered.
The Omni Hotel next door got the same treatment through partnership rather than ownership. It’s connected to Petco Park by a skybridge, some rooms have field views, and the arrangement reads as an amenity the Padres helped create, not a leak they’re trying to plug. Compare that to the Cubs’ argument that Wrigley View Rooftop “lied to consumers” about a partnership that ended in 2023. San Diego never let that partnership lapse into a dispute in the first place.
Then there’s Gallagher Square, the grass berm behind center field, marketed as an affordable, official way to watch a game from just outside the traditional seating bowl. It’s the Padres’ answer to the demand a rooftop business would otherwise capture: give the budget-conscious fan a legitimate ticket instead of leaving that demand for someone else to monetize from across the street.
Same asset, opposite governance model.
Both franchises are managing the same underlying scarce resource: a sightline into a live product the team spent money to produce. The Cubs are litigating to establish, after the fact, that they own something a third party has been selling for two decades. The Padres never let that gap open. Every profitable angle on the field, the rooftop bar, the hotel view, the cheap-seats alternative, sits inside the Padres’ own P&L.
I’ve watched enough sports properties get built and rebuilt to know the real lesson isn’t legal, it’s sequencing. A team that controls its perimeter at groundbreaking never has to argue about property rights in federal court twenty years later. A team that inherits its perimeter, the way the Cubs did with a 110-year-old ballpark surrounded by a residential neighborhood, ends up asking a judge to grant retroactively what smarter site planning would have granted automatically.
The open question for Judge Coleman isn’t really about copyright law or the 1938 Pirates radio case. It’s whether a court can manufacture, after the fact, the kind of ownership structure the Padres simply built in from the start. My read: even if the Cubs win, they’ll have spent millions defending a right that Petco Park never had to assert, because it never had to be asked.