Commentary: From far away, an L.A. couple grapples with all-too-familiar debate after Dodgers win

MADISON, Wis. — In Wisconsin’s state capital, where the orange leaves are falling and everyone seems to be wearing the red and white of the University of Wisconsin Badgers, the pride and pain of rooting for the Dodgers in 2025 played out in the home of Carolina Sarmiento and Revel Sims.

They are professors of urban planning, originally from southern California – he is from Eagle Rock, she from Santa Ana; they met at UCLA — and longtime friends who have lived in Madison for a decade but are still involved in anti-immigrant and gentrification activism back home. I visited them recently as part of a speaking tour to Midwestern colleges and found myself in the middle of a debate that has spanned the lives of too many people we know back home.

It’s unlikely to disappear completely, no matter how many rings and parades the Boys in Blue rack up:

Is it okay to revel in this year’s World Series champions?

On the one hand, the Dodgers won back-to-back titles for the first time and became the first team to do so in a generation. The team resembled Los Angeles at its best: people from all over the world who put aside their egos to win and bring joy to millions of Angelenos during a most difficult year for the City of Angels.

Los Angeles, a city long synonymous with winning — the weather, the teams, the people, the food — has suffered a terrible series of defeats that began with the deadly and catastrophic Eaton and Palisades fires and continues with the mass evictions that the Trump administration is promising to intensify.

That’s where the problem came for Sarmiento and other Dodgers fans. To them, the team’s actions and inaction this year have been indefensible.

“For me, it started when the Dodgers went to the White House,” the 45-year-old said as we drove to their blue-and-white home. She took particular issue with shortstop Mookie Betts, who skipped a White House visit in 2019 while with the World Series-winning Boston Red Sox but shook Trump’s hand this time around, calling his previous snub “very selfish.”

“Who touched his ear?” she exclaimed, bringing us dried mangoes to snack on while we waited for Sims to come home. “Since when has defending injustice been a matter of You?”

Sarmiento did not grow up as a Dodgers fan, but took to the team once she and Sims became a couple. They and their two young sons usually attended Dodgers games on their trips home and regularly caught the Dodgers in Milwaukee whenever they played the Brewers. Manager Dave Roberts “luckily” once signed a jersey for them when the family ran into him at a hotel, Sarmiento said.

In Madison, she long wore a Dodgers sweatshirt emblazoned with the Mexican flag that Sims bought her because “it was a way to represent her country. But not anymore. I tell Revel, ‘Baby, I’m not asking you to boycott the Dodgers forever, but they have to give us something back.'”

Of course, the Dodgers blocked federal agents from entering the Dodger Stadium parking lot in June, just after migration raided a Home Depot facility. Shortly after, the team donated $1 million to the California Community Foundation to direct toward nonprofits helping families affected by Trump’s Leviathan eviction.

But as the summer wore on, Sarmiento grew frustrated that only Dodgers outfielder Kiké Hernández spoke out against the immigration raids and Trump’s deployment of the Marines and National Guard. She also questions why Dodgers president Mark Walter wouldn’t respond to accusations that companies he’s invested in are doing business with Trump’s deportation machine. One of them owns a stake in a private prison company that contracts with the federal government to run immigration detention centers; another has a joint venture with Palantir, with which ICE has contracted to create data surveillance systems that would make the Eye of Sauron from the “Lord of the Rings” series as harmless as a teddy bear.

“After a while, it’s like a woman who knows her partner is a cheater but keeps saying, ‘He’s not a cheater, he’s not a cheater,’ and gets upset when he cheats on her again. At that point, all you can say is, ‘Girl…‘”

I brought up how many Dodgers fans I know saw the team’s World Series win as a giant middle finger to Trump.

The heroes of Games 6 and 7, outfielders Kiké Hernández and second baseman Miguel Rojas, come from Puerto Rico and Venezuela, respectively, a commonwealth that Trump has neglected and is salivating to invade. The team’s most popular player, Shohei Ohtani, still proudly speaks his native Japanese, even though he has lived in the United States for eight years and knows some English. Tens of thousands of fans came to watch the Dodgers victory parade and celebration at Dodger Stadium, many of whom were undoubtedly immigrants.

Isn’t it okay to let people be happy?

“It’s like community benefits agreements,” Sarmiento responded, referring to a tactic by neighborhood groups that allows them to obtain commitments from developers on issues such as open space, union contracts and affordable housing, under threat of protests and lawsuits. “You know what’s coming, so you try to get something get out. This year was a political moment that fans could have seized on and they didn’t, so the Dodgers gave it nothing.

We greeted Sims as he entered. The two of us went down to the basement, where he watched the World Series in exile on a big screen TV.

“It’s kind of lonely being a Dodgers fan here,” the 48-year-old joked, although he was heartened to have seen a fellow University of Wisconsin professor sporting a Freddie Freeman jersey earlier in the day. Sims grew up going to Dodger Stadium with his father and remembers going to games alone in the mid-2000s “when it wasn’t a great time.”

He recalled the Dodgers’ owner from that era: Frank McCourt, who raised ticket and concession prices seemingly every year and who still partly owns the parking lots surrounding Dodger Stadium. Fans responded to his disastrous regime by protesting before and during matches. “It was disheartening not to see that in the stadium this year, when there was an even bigger problem.”

Sims felt “conflicted” in favor of the Dodgers this year. He watched every game he could, but admitted he found the team’s celebration of ethnic pride nights “hollow” as raids increased across Los Angeles and the Trump administration attacked the rights of the groups the Dodgers honored.

“It would have been easy [for the Dodgers] to make a bland statement: “We are a team full of immigrants in a city of immigrants and we are proud of all of us” – and you wouldn’t need to go any further. They have a historical obligation to do so because of their history.

But not supporting the Dodgers was never an option.

Pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto is on stage during the World Series celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday.

(Carlin Stiehl / For Time)

“I want to see the people of Los Angeles happy. The parade! It’s a free vacation. People just give up their jobs and don’t get in trouble for it. We’re the only city – not New York, not Boston, not San Francisco – that chants against us. We’re despised and misunderstood. So if the Dodgers win, Los Angeles wins.”

Sarmiento joined us. “She’s my political better half,” Sims cracked. “Caro told me to choose another sport.”

“No, I didn’t!” she responded kindly. “I just said take a break, just for now. A political break.”

Sims admitted that a vintage jacket he used to break out every October as the Dodgers made another playoff run and Wisconsin turned cold was still in the closet. “I haven’t worn any gear all year.”

“When you went to the game!” Sarmiento countered, referencing a visit to Milwaukee earlier this year with her local softball team.

“I wore a Valenzuela jersey to represent Los Angeles,” Sims responded as Sarmiento shook his head.

He laughed.

“I like the team. I just don’t like This team to say nothing. But that’s what I signed up for.