As part of their Pride Night celebration, a Dodgers official received a commemorative scroll from Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath before the team opened its three-game series against the San Francisco Giants.
“It is truly my pleasure to be celebrating Pride with the Dodgers,” Horvath said. “Especially a time like this to have the Dodgers look at our community and see all of us, and celebrate everyone, especially our LGBTQ community, it is just so incredibly special.”
In almost any other time, Horvath’s presentation would have inspired, well, pride — specifically, pride in how the Dodgers started celebrating Pride Nights when they weren’t commonplace in sports.
On Friday night, however, with many parts of Los Angeles terrorized by large-scale immigration sweeps, the county supervisor’s words evoked an entirely different range of emotions.
Read more: Fears of ICE raids upend life in L.A. County, from schools to Home Depot parking lots
Demonstrations against the federal raids have been staged in downtown for more than a week, but the Dodgers have remained silent. Angel City FC and LAFC released statements sympathizing with the residents experiencing “fear and uncertainty,” but the Dodgers have remained silent.
If the Dodgers really see everyone, as Horvath suggested, they’re ignoring what’s happening right in front of them.
Literally.
The Dodgers boast that more than 40% of their fan base is Latino, but they can’t even be bothered to offer the shaken community any words of comfort.
A protestor wearing a Dodgers cap is detained and carried by law enforcement after helping close the 101 Freeway on June. 8. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
How ungrateful. How disrespectful. How cowardly.
Don’t expect this to change.
“We’re not going to comment,” Dodgers executive vice president and chief marketing officer Lon Rosen said.
Considering what’s happened in the last week, do the Dodgers regret visiting President Donald Trump at the White House earlier this season?
“We’re not going to comment on anything,” Rosen said.
When the Dodgers announced they accepted Trump’s White House invitation, team president Stan Kasten claimed the decision had “nothing to do with politics.” Kasten sounded as if he was counting on the fans to give the team a pass for visiting an aspiring tyrant, either because their love of the Dodgers overwhelmed their disgust for Trump or because they lacked the intellectual faculties to connect Trump’s racist rhetoric to real-life consequences.
Read more: Hernández: Dodgers visiting Trump’s White House goes against everything they represent
But what were once abstract concepts proposed by Trump and other right-wing extremists are now realities, and these realities have struck Los Angeles particularly hard.
The detention of working immigrants outside of Home Depots. The breaking up of families. The racial profiling that has resulted in law enforcement harassing American citizens. The propaganda campaign to portray the largely-peaceful demonstrations as an insurrection. The invasion of federal troops. The general feeling of unease that has swept over the city.
The team had said nothing about any of this. Manager Dave Roberts, the franchise’s designated public-relations meat shield, was the only person to acknowledge the situation.
“I just hope that we can be a positive distraction for what people are going through in Los Angeles right now,” Roberts said on Monday in San Diego.
The Dodgers are once again asking a significant portion of their fans to look the other way, but how can they look the other way when these developments affect many of them directly?
Dodgers fans honor Fernando Valenzuela at a memorial outside Dodger Stadium on Oct. 24, 2024. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
All because the Dodgers are afraid of offending the 32% of Los Angeles County voters who cast their ballots for Trump in the most recent presidential election, many of whom don’t expect ICE agents to ever show up at their workplace.
The Dodgers have abdicated their social responsibilities, and in doing so, they have once again let down many of their most loyal fans — the fans who made the Dodgers a part of their family because of Fernando Valenzuela, the fans who passed down the love of the team to their children and grandchildren, the fans who wear their merchandise around town.
That won’t stop the likes of Kasten and Rosen from reaching into their pockets, of course. A couple of hours before their team’s 6-2 loss to the Giants on Friday night, a commercial featuring an upcoming promotion was shown on the Dodger Stadium video scoreboard.
The promotion: Valenzuela’s bobblehead night.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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