I’m not going to write about Trump/Musk/MAGA and politics today. Or the Supreme Court’s overreaching split-the-baby rulings and politics. Or Elon Musk — LMAO — calling trade chief Peter Navarro a “moron” and politics. Or Trump on the mass anti-Trump protests across the globe Saturday — “I think it’s a shame. I think it’s a disgrace. And it’s got to stop,” Trump told Fox News — and politics. Or RFK Jr. and measles and vaccines and two infected Coloradans and politics.
I’m going to try something different. I’m going to write about sports and, uh, OK, yes, politics.
And although the lead sports story Tuesday is the Nuggets’ panic-firing of coach Michael Malone, the most successful coach in team history, with three games left in the season and the playoffs looming. But I can’t connect that to politics, unless we blame the members of the right-wing Walton/Walmart family who own the team, which may be a stretch. Or maybe not.
No, this is about the Los Angeles Dodgers visiting the anti-DEI White House, betraying the memory of Jackie Robinson, who, when breaking the color line in 1947, became the most important person to ever play the game of baseball. Or probably any American sport.
This is about the Dodgers, celebrating their 2024 World Series championship at the White House, with a puffed-up Trump glorying in the fact that the team of Jackie Robinson accepted his invitation to produce for him a feel-good photo op when so many of us don’t feel good at all.
The Dodgers franchise rightly celebrates itself as a champion of diversity, equity and inclusion, but still visited the rabidly anti-DEI White House, which had the Defense Department scrub mention of Robinson’s experience with World War II-era racism. Because DEI?
And it wasn’t just Robinson who was being erased because history belongs to the victors — and, boy, are the gleeful Trumpists in full revision mode. Also scrubbed were stories about Navajo Code Talkers, who played such a key role in winning World War II. And the story of Ira Hayes, a Native American who was one of six to famously plant the American flag at Iwo Jima.
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SUBSCRIBEThe stories have all been restored, although many with revisions to minimize race, after an uproar from people who actually know what heroes look like.
But the message didn’t get through to the Dodgers, who, like so many, are just pretending that everything is normal in America under the Trump restoration. It’s not political, the Dodgers brass told us, as if everything isn’t political these days. Trump took the time, by the way, to mention two senators he didn’t like. Is that normal when the White House is honoring sports champions?
As close readers of this column over the years may know, I was born a Dodgers fan, back when they were the Brooklyn Dodgers and when they were called Dem Bums (or later The Boys of Summer) and definitely not the Evil Empire, a title belonging solely, and forever, to the New York Yankees.
The Dodgers were mother’s milk to me. My first dog — a member of the family before I was born — was named Dodger. My mother used to insist Dodger was my first word. It’s what fans do. Other family dogs included Campy, Duke and Sandy.
My father taught me about the Dodgers. And my father’s father, who came to America escaping a pogrom in a village outside Odessa, then a part of Russia, in the early 1900s and found freedom and opportunity and, yes, the Dodgers — taught him about the Dodgers. (I’m not saying that in today’s America, my grandfather would probably be turned away or maybe sent to El Salvador using the Alien Enemies Act, but I’m thinking maybe he would have been.)
My other grandfather, by the way, came to America from Poland as an infant and found freedom and opportunity and, sadly, the Yankees. He once attempted to exile me from the family for making Mickey pop up to end the game. I had to apologize, but with fingers crossed. (If you don’t understand, you’re not a real fan.) He might have been deported, too.
So when the Dodgers visited the White House to celebrate their 2024 title, they pretty much broke my heart.
I won’t stop rooting for them. I rooted for them when they were owned by Fox, for God’s sake.
But still, as Los Angeles Times columnist Dylan Hernandez put it: “Eight days after their White House visit, the Dodgers will celebrate Jackie Robinson Day. They will insinuate, if not outright say, they are more than a baseball team. They will portray themselves as leaders of social progress. They will be full of it.
“The Dodgers are embarking on the path of least resistance, and that’s not what leaders do. Leaders don’t cower in fear of ignorant extremists, no matter how many of them there are. Leaders do what is right and deal with the consequences.”
Many have noted the people who have defined the Dodgers — people like Robinson, Branch Rickey, Sandy Koufax, Shohei Ohtani. One Black, one white, one Jewish, one Japanese. You don’t get much more diverse than that.
On April 15, on Jackie Robinson Day, every player wears Robinson’s No. 42 to honor his legacy. It took Major League Baseball many years to finally honor Robinson in the correct way. But now the Dodgers are dishonoring his memory.
As one writer suggested, the Dodgers could have all worn No. 42 to the White House as a protest. They didn’t. They uniformly said how much they enjoyed it. Even Mookie Betts, the Dodgers superstar who happens to be Black and who boycotted the trip to the Trump White House in 2019 when he played for the Red Sox, went along this time.
In 2020, Betts, who had just been traded to L.A., led the team in protest — all the players, Black and white, participating — of the police killing of a Black man. The game was canceled when the players on both teams refused to play.
And yet, it’s too much to put this on Betts, the only Black player on the team, who said he went to the White House this time to honor his teammates. As did manager Dave Roberts, who was born to a Japanese mother and Black father in Okinawa, where his Marine father was stationed. The Dodgers’ ownership is to blame.
If you know the Jackie Robinson story, you know it was not only about being the first Black player to cross the white lines and help change America in the process. He honored himself by standing up for truth and justice and what we like to think of as the American way.
On July 6, 1944, when Robinson was in the Army, he would be court martialed because while on a bus to “the colored officers club,” a white driver insisted Robinson move to the back of the bus. He wouldn’t. He didn’t. This was 11 years before Rosa Parks and her courageous stance.
After a four-hour trial, Robinson, facing a jury of eight white men and one Black, was exonerated. And this is the story the Defense Department wanted removed.
In 1947, when Dodgers owner Branch Rickey decided to integrate Major League Baseball, he chose Robinson not only for his Hall of Fame baseball skills, but for his human skills, for his burning intellect, for being the right person at the right time.
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3:05 AM MDT on Mar 30, 20255:32 PM MDT on Mar 28, 2025There are 63 Major Leaguers born in Venezuela. Three of them play for the Dodgers and went to the White House Monday. Trump isn’t making Venezuelans sit in the back of the bus. He’s sending suspected Venezuelan gang members by the planeful, and without due process, to a notorious El Salvador prison. We know at least one of them is innocent — mistakenly deported despite being court protected — and possibly many more.
And so, the Supreme Court ruled that before being deported, a person now has the right to be notified in advance and to be given due process. We’ll see if Trump goes along or simply ignores that part of the ruling. Were these Venezuelans celebrating at the White House at the right time? Did they really have any choice?
We find ourselves in a very bad time, with American democracy at risk. And Jackie Robinson, who was a Republican back when many Blacks were Republicans in honor of Lincoln and in protest of the Democrats who ruled the Jim Crow South, certainly would recognize that.
I’d like to believe Robinson, were he alive, would not have shown up at the White House Monday. He knew too much about history — and even more about how one courageous person can do so much to change it.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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