By the time you see this, it will be Monday. The defending World Series champion Dodgers will be going to the White House for a visit with President Donald Trump. Including Mookie Betts, who once declined the visit when his then-defending World Series champion Red Sox accepted the same invitation from the same president.
Three days before the Dodgers' scheduled White House visit, Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano urged the Dodgers to show up wearing jerseys with Jackie Robinson's number 42. I hope the Dodgers read that column and heeded the advice. Then, after the White House visit, perform a team march in those jerseys from the White House to the Pentagon, right up to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's office.
Hark back to March. When the Defense Department scrubbed the stories of Robinson (an Army lieutenant in World War II, who beat a court martial for refusing to go to the back of a bus), the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Ira Hayes, the Native American Marine who was one of the six raising the American flag at Iwo Jima. When DoD press secretary John Ullyot cited Hegseth saying, "[Diversity, Equality, Inclusion] is dead at the Defense Department." Until it wasn't, within just days, following an uproar of the type that's become second nature to Trump/Trump Administration doings, sayings, undoings, unsayings.
"It's not a political stance that I'm taking," the Mookie Monster told The Athletic's Fabian Ardaya last Friday. "I know no matter what I say, what I do, people are going to take it as political, but that's definitely not what it is. This about an accomplishment that the Dodgers were able to accomplish last year."
Was Betts unaware of Trump's DoD's bid to turn Robinson and other wartime African-Americans of the 1940s into non-persons? No one is saying he or his Dodger teammates should turn the visit into a giant raspberry. But just wearing the Robinson jerseys there would be a more powerful rebuke to Trump than any verbal schpritz.
"Opponents of Trump can't scream into the void, or among themselves, and think that's resistance enough," Arellano wrote.
They shouldn't cede the traditions of this country, like the flag, the White House and democracy, to a tyrant like Trump just because he has wrapped himself in them.
Going to the White House does not normalize Trump — it's a reminder that the place is ours, not his. . .
. . . Guys: Y'all pioneered the type of globalism and multiculturalism that Trump loathes, that L.A. now exemplifies and that continues to power the best franchise in baseball. It's time to stand tall for the Dodger Way at the moment it matters the most.
"We have a lot of different people that are part of this organization," said Dodger manager Dave Roberts.
Different backgrounds, different cultures, race, gender. So everyone had a different story. Economic situations. So we are all going as an organization. I do know that we're all aligned, and everyone's going to have their opinions.
This is not a political thing, and I'm not going to sit up here and make it political. I'm excited to, again, recognize the 2024 World Series champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Robert should be excited likewise to offer the president a reminder that the Dodgers stand for something above and beyond World Series rings. If they don't want to wear number 42 Dodger jerseys to the White House, Roberts should think of handing Trump a number 42 Dodger jersey. Hand it to him, and say nothing.
Then, Roberts and the Dodgers should turn around — before they lend or spend any further credibility upon a man who rejects that for which the Dodgers have stood, since Jackie Robinson stepped onto a field to begin the Dodger career that launched a powerful rebuke to formal segregation and Robinson himself into Cooperstown and world immortality — and they should get the hell out.
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