Major League Baseball Sues AIG Over COVID-19 Claims | Legal insurance blog for property insurance

I grew up as a baseball player. From the time I was old enough to stand and throw a ball, baseball was a big part of my life. It taught me valuable life lessons such as winning and losing, leadership, playing with a team, hard work and commitment. I played all four years where I participated in Johns Hopkins and even got some mediocre awards with these stats. This baseball season was weird because of the pandemic. It was shortened to sixty games, DH across the league and the craziest change, no fans. Before the Major League Baseball ("MLB") season started, I found myself starving for baseball and watching the Korean baseball league on ESPN.

Recently, MLB sued its insurance companies, AIG, Factory Mutual Insurance Company and Interstate Fire & Casualty Company, for losses related to the COVID-1

9 pandemic at the California State Court. The 336 complaint is here. Specifically, MLB seeks losses from unsold tickets, concessions, parking, suites and luxury seating licenses, sales of parking goods, corporate sponsorship, local and national media losses, plus tens of millions in lost revenue for MLB Advanced Media, amounting to billions of dollars in losses. In total, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred estimates that COVID-related restrictions placed in the league led to about $ 3 billion in losses. Mark Friedlander, director of corporate communications at the Insurance Information Institute (III), has argued that paying billions of dollars in claims to Major League Baseball teams would bankrupt the real estate and accident industry and leave U.S. homeowners and drivers unprotected for claims that are actually covered. . ”. To forget for a second that III is run by insurance companies and their representatives, AIG has averaged nearly $ 62 billion in revenue per year since 2009.

MLB insists that it has paid premiums to get the best of the best insurance so this must be covered. Not many insured persons have corrected themselves well in their insurance claims for business interruptions based on COVID-19 losses. California seems to be more insurance-friendly because they recently tried to clear California's parish bill of 1552 which is now stopped. My colleague, Victor Jacobellis, has previously blogged about the many insured friendly bills introduced in California. The bill would create three coverage-friendly "rebuttable assumptions":

1. COVID-19 was present on the insured's property and caused physical damage to the property that was the direct cause of the business interruption.
2. COVID-19 was presently the property located within the geographical location covered by the civil authority's order and caused physical damage to the property which was the direct cause of the insured's claim for business interruption. damage to the property which was the direct cause which prevented entry and exit into the insured's property and resulted in the insurance's business interruption.

It will be interesting to see if MLB gets past the first round of proposals to reject, and if they do, what further opportunity do they have. Maybe MLB should take advice from one of its greatest players, Yogi Berra, who said "when you get to a fork on the road, take it."