This is going to sound crazy, but I’m pretty sure the Dodgers only won the 2025 World Series because of an important decision I made: not to watch the game.
All right…we all know how this ends—cheers, tears, champagne, fireworks, street takeovers, cops on horses hitting people standing in line to celebrate at a bar (?!), beers, tequila, hangovers!
And now we are all cautiously looking forward to a parade in the heart of this Latino majority city at a time when the federal government has made it a point to target and violate hard working Latinos civil rights.
This is L.A. baby! When the Dodgers win, we all win—but hold up. I get it.
There are people already lining up to turn, or continue to turn, this Dodgers team into a call to reform baseball or as a civil rights protest of some sort. And, I mean, go to the parade, if that’s what you’re into. Protest it, if that’s what you’re into. But don’t forget for a second there are life-long Dodgers fans who will not feel safe. And don’t forget there are life-long Dodgers fans who needed this win. In some cases, those are the same people.
I don’t have the stomach to boycott the team I love, using a phone and a social media platform respectively owned by billionaires who are also complicit in these dehumanizing raids.
Lest we forget, this is just year one of this shiny new government sponsored targeting of our community and trying to ruin everything we love, even baseball, by dividing, lying and scapegoating.
But I get why it’s a hill people are willing to die on, or why it is that they expect more from the Dodgers than from Silicon Valley oligarchs.
It’s not even political, so spare me the “keep politics out of sports” crap. It’s a human rights issue.
After the game, I saw this clip where will.i.am says the best team in the world is made up of foreigners from all over the world. “We got a team from all over the world. And in L.A. we are a team from all over the world. Why can’t L.A. be treated like the Dodgers,” he tells the Brown Bag Power106 morning show.
So let me live, baby! This is L.A.! When the Dodgers win, we all win—theoretically.
That’s how it’s going. But how it started is kind of just as important as how it ends.
So let’s go back to Saturday morning. The Dodgers are getting ready to play in Game 7 of the World Series. Something, honestly, I never thought I'd see in my life.
When you were a kid, playing baseball on a cul-de-sac in Southeast L.A., you pretend like you're playing for the Dodgers and every at bat is the ninth inning in Game 7 and the whole game's on the line. And boom! You’re Miguel Rojas homering to tie the game up going into the bottom of the ninth. Then bam! You’re Miguel Rojas throwing to home plate to stop the Blue Jays from scoring and winning the whole thing in the bottom of the ninth. And let's go! You're Will Smith going yard to take the lead in extra innings. Then wow! You’re Andy Pages leaping into Kiké Hernández to steal a game winner at the wall. And finally, you’re Mookie Betts turning the double play to win the World Series.
Heroic scenarios like that go through your head. But you’re never like, “I’m not watching the game to make sure they win it all.”
Early that morning, on a hike with my wife, I thought about it a lot—the Dodgers win whenever I don’t watch.
I was at a watch party for Game 2, distracted, not watching the screen, in a conversation with two former Latino journalists—a Chicano from San Jose who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his Cuban exile wife from Miami who won the Pulitzer. That 18-inning marathon game they won? I literally closed my eyes every time the game was on the line. But when I watched they lost. So I skipped game 6, following along on my phone while stuffing my face with Holbox.
As I contemplated between heavy breaths and coyote sightings, my wife, who loves how the Dodgers help bring community together, spent the hike planning our night in her head. Should we go to a friend's house or to a watch party, a bar somewhere? I told her: no.
I couldn’t watch. I didn’t want to jinx it. She understood.
But here’s the thing: I did watch. Just not via TV. I listened. I listened to my neighbors. I listened to my neighborhood. I listened to this city of L.A.
Like my Indigenous ancestors reading smoke signals, I listened for fireworks as signs from the San Gabriel Mountains.
Every time the Dodgers scored, fireworks went off on my block. Every time things looked bad, I heard groans across the street.
When Max Muncy hit that homer, I heard it. When Miguel Rojas tied the game in the ninth, I thought we’d won — there were so many fireworks I had to check the score. “Nope,” it said. Tie game.
And let’s not forget one of the biggest reasons the series got to that moment — Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Japanese ace the Dodgers signed for the long haul. He threw a complete game in Game 2 of the Series, allowed just one run, then came back again in Game 6 with six strong innings to force Game 7. Then got brought in to finish Game 7!
My friends began texting me:
“Are you watching this?”
“I’m losing my mind.”
“This game aged me ten years.”
I texted my buddy Milo: “I can’t watch. Text me WHEN we win please.”
I heard another barrage of explosions when Will Smith crushed the homer to take the lead in the 11th. But I still didn’t look. I knew Milo would text when they won.
Meanwhile, at my parents house in Downey, my family was watching. My mom, my sister, and brother were praying to God to bless this team with three more outs and another title.
It was around this point in the night that I realized it was a silly superstition, my not watching, but there was something deeper going on.
So let’s go back a little farther in time.
In January of this year, fires raged across L.A., and I saw my city united to stand for each other in mutual aid to help people in the Eaton and Palisades fires. I watched immigrants rush to help remove debris to speed up the recovery process. It was a brutal blow to L.A. but we rallied.
But let’s go back farther. During the 2020 pandemic, Latinos were a massive part of the essential workforce that kept the whole country running during the worst of the pandemic. And yet, even though we’ve been the hardest hit by the economic head winds, we are also the most blamed for them.
Now let’s jump to the start of the baseball season. The Dodgers were just starting their quest for a repeat title when the ICE siege of L.A. began.
Sporting events—especially through the Dodgers and Lakers—at their greatest moments, makes me believe that anything is possible. That the good guys win. That our “better angels” will carry the day. That the long arc of history does indeed “bend toward justice.”
But the world around us Angelenos has felt heavy all year long.
So not watching Game 7 for me, was really more about my mental health than about my superstitions.
The Dodgers are supposed to help me escape all the craziness of the world, but this year, they’ve been right in the middle of a lot of it by remaining largely silent during the ICE raids and even its principal owner having financial ties to migrant detention centers…but also by dragging this series out to seven games, slumping at the plate and struggling on the mound even though they have the highest payroll in baseball.
Thankfully, the Dodgers—this team of immigrants, and descendants of immigrants and indigenous peoples of the Americas—pulled off one last magic trick this post season.
I don’t remember which came first, my buddy’s text message, the fireworks or my instinct to check the score. But the Dodgers won it all during a magical Game 7 and I didn’t see almost any of it.
To quote another Pulitzer Prize winner: I’m fine with it. I walk the line with it.
I don’t know if my not watching helped them as much as it helped me. And I truly don’t know how this parade is going to look with ICE still roaming around these streets targeting the Dodgers most loyal fanbase. But I do know that for one beautiful brief moment we can bask in the glory of L.A. pride and L.A. love.
More than anything, for me, this win is a massive victory—for this team of foreigners and its massively diverse fan base—at a time when there aren’t many wins at all for people like us.
This is L.A. baby! When the Dodgers win, we all win—at least for now.
