Steiner Sports is facing a lawsuit from a New York Yankees season ticket holder from New Jersey, claiming the stadium seats he bought for $2,000 – the seats he sat in for 23 years – were not the original seats as promised. John Lefkus claims the seats had been repainted and the armrests were replaced. Lefkus filed a $5 million class-action lawsuit against Steiner and the Yankees on behalf of all Yankees fans who purchased seats.
“I feel like the steroid stars. My seats come with an asterisk,” Lefkus said in a UPI article. “My boys grew up in these seats from boys to teenagers to men. We had them for 23 years.”
In a New York Post article, Brandon Steiner, founder of Steiner Sports, explained the re-painting of the seats as part of the process because of concerns over lead in the paint. All of the seatbacks and bottoms were tagged during the process, but the armrests were not. “It was impossible to tag all the armrests,” Steiner told the Post. “They all had to go into an oven and we didn’t have a system in place to keep track of them.” Steiner said he offered Lefkus a refund and then offered the seats for free.
The lawsuit reads, “Seats sold as authentic, unrefurbished, and original Yankee Stadium seats were simply new pairs of seats constructed with a combination of new hardware and repainted parts of old seats.”
