The Dodgers Are Planning to Visit the White House. It’s a Disgrace.
To meet with Trump now is to defile the memory of Dodgers great Jackie Robinson and to humiliate many of the team’s own players.
Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, right, greets Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson, before a game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Dodgers in Los Angeles on April 15, 2022.
(Ashley Landis / AP Photo)
In April 2022, I was at a packed Dodger Stadium, rubbing shoulders with the ghosts of Chavez Ravine. This wasn’t just a game. It was a celebration of the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson smashing Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947. On this night, the team’s ownership group handed out tens of thousands of baseball jerseys with Robinson’s number 42 on the back. Then, in a showstopping moment, Jackie’s incredible then-100-year-old widow, Rachel Robinson, was driven around the field waving to the fans. I’ve never heard a stadium so loud before the opening pitch. It was beautiful. Yet now when I think about it, I wince. I wince because the 2024 World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers have announced that they will be visiting the Trump White House on April 7.
Two weeks ago, an outcry arose when Trump’s secretary of defense, former Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth, oversaw the removal of a webpage praising Jackie Robinson’s military service during World War II. The page redirected to one with a URL containing the initials DEI. In Trump world, being branded “DEI” means you are undeserving of acknowledgement, because, for “woke” reasons, you leapfrogged a better white man. “Woke” has become a stand-in for every slur Trump’s followers are itching to say.
The bumbling Hegseth even had his press department blame DEI on “cultural Marxism,” a phrase that stupid people use to try to sound both antisemitic and smart. I hope 89-year-old Dodgers legend Sandy Koufax isn’t aware that his team is wading into this sewer of antisemites by visiting the White House. He’d put a broch on the organization he loves.
After an uproar that Hegseth’s band of idiots never saw coming, the Defense Department reversed course, blaming an AI program for trashing Robinson’s page. No apology was issued. Only a smirk. This kind of unrepentant reaction is why Dodgers primary owner and multi-billionaire Mark Walters needs to understand that going to the White House feeds the Dodgers into Trump’s propaganda machine. Trump is sending a message to followers and anti-racist detractors alike: “I can be racist as I want, even toward Jackie Robinson! And the Dodgers will still come crawling.” Breaking people is how this administration projects strength. Walters will smile alongside the president, looking both complicit and broken while Trump puffs out his chest, making clear that he operates not only above the law but any standard of decency. When stories are told in the future about the indignities Robinson had to suffer, people will learn about the role played by Mark Walters.
The Dodgers should also refuse this invite because Trump has put the lives of several Dodgers and their families at risk. There are 63 Major League Baseball players who were born in Venezuela. On the Dodgers, Edgardo Henriquez, Brusdar Graterol, and Miguel Rojas are all from Venezuela. Given that the United States is now sending Venezuelans without due process to an El Salvadoran labor camp, telling these players to set foot in this White House seems cruel. It’s telling them to shut up and play, or risk something worse than a team fine.
The Dodgers have a beautifully diverse tradition marked by legends like Robinson, Roy Campanella, Koufax, Fernando Valenzuela, Hideo Nomo, and now the great Shohei Ohtani. Diversity has been their strength. There is, however, a parallel Dodgers tradition that this visit to the White House snugly fits into. That tradition is marked by former owner Walter O’Malley’s choosing profits over people: first by moving the team out of Brooklyn to Los Angeles and then successfully lobbying the city to uproot the Mexican immigrant community of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium. Then there was team president Al Campanis, who in 1987 said on national television that “Blacks don’t have the necessities” to manage teams or be executives. Campanis bleated this on a show meant to celebrate Jackie Robinson. Going to this White House, in 2025, will join that shameful list.
Instead of saying no, the Dodgers have made the coward’s choices. The team is acting furtively, with no one on the team saying if there was even a discussion as to whether to decline the White House invite. No player will respond to questions about the insult to Robinson’s legacy or if they are concerned about the dangers of the ICE kidnappings. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said in 2019 that he’d never visit a Trump White House. Now Roberts says, “It’s certainly a huge honor to get the invitation to the White House. To my understanding, every World Series champion gets that honor, so it’s a great honor for all of us.” He said “honor” three times. One only does that under duress. Someone check Roberts’s eye blinks for Morse code.
This country is being run into the ground by an addled, narcissistic autocrat who takes a special pleasure in seeing former opponents break. He is smirking at you, Mark Walters, because he doesn’t have to apologize for anything. In fact, your presence is an apology to him. If the team visits the White House, you will become part of stories that we’ll tell about Trump’s desecration of Robinson’s memory. You will have done nothing on behalf of the team’s Venezuelan players. You are not living up to the best of your franchise’s history. You are living down to the worst. You aren’t Jackie Robinson. You’re Al Campanis. And you should either cancel or have everyone on the team wear #42 jerseys when meeting Trump. Make a statement—because Jackie Robinson, whom you claim to honor, never suffered in silence when there was something that needed to be said.
If you want to tell the team how you feel about this, just e-mail [email protected].
