The Dodgers are back home at Dodger Stadium on Monday for Game 3 of the World Series. Shawn Hubler, the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Times, examines why the Dodgers’ World Series run is resonating with many Angelenos.
‘We Persevere’
The rest of the baseball world loves to hate the Los Angeles Dodgers. The team is too rich, they say, too store-bought, too superhumanly gifted. But this has not been an easy year in Dodger country. “A lot of people here have lost a lot,” Nico Villamar, 44, said on Saturday night as he watched Game 2 with his wife, dog and two children on the patio of a crowded sports bar in the East San Gabriel Valley. The Eaton fire in January, he said, had consumed the home of one of his wife’s co-workers and, for a time, closed his children’s school. Immigration raids then traumatized people he knew in three different counties, he said, and he worried constantly about what the contraction of the entertainment industry would do to his livelihood in postproduction television. “People look at us and see this flashy thing,” he said, “but we’re just people trying to make a living here.” The air was warm, and just slightly crisp as night fell. The palms were tall silhouettes. Southern California is a beautiful place, as beautiful as they tell you, but steely, too, in ways that aren’t as obvious from the outside. It tests people, and draws people who aren’t afraid to be tested. Outside on the sidewalk, Cesia Chacon and Arturo Arevalo, both 21, said the rest of the country did not understand how politically fraught this series had become, particularly for the region’s Latinos. The couple said they had grown up in Echo Park, near Dodger Stadium, in a part of the city that becomes a sea of blue on game days. But since the Trump administration cracked down on Los Angeles starting in June, sweeping up authorized and unauthorized immigrants alike and calling in the National Guard after protests erupted, the team has struggled to balance its concern for immigrant fans with the perils of angering the White House. “I feel like we’re back on track now, but, yeah, it’s been a lot,” Ms. Chacon said. Up the street, Stacy Yamato-Jasmin, 60, who grew up in Los Angeles County and worked for the region’s transportation authority for decades before her recent retirement, viewed the Dodgers’ success as a kind of defiance. “Sounds like sour grapes,” she said, when told that many in America were rooting for the Canadian team. She has been a Dodger fan since childhood, she said, and they have not always been champions. If her team is a contender now for its second title in two years, she said, it is because they have earned it. As a Japanese American, she reveled in the success of imported stars known for their sheer drive, like Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki. Perhaps, she suggested, the rest of the country did not fully understand why this place might attract them: “We persevere.” Other California news
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