The Dodgers had their ‘shut up and dribble’ moment
After years of protesting Trump, the Dodgers folded and visited the White House. Sending the fan base and players a clear message who calls the shots.
It appears that this week, the Los Angeles Dodgers' Board of Directors demanded their players “shut up and play” when the organization accepted President Donald Trump’s invitation to the White House. As expected, this move ignited outrage among people in LA and their loyal fan base. Overall, the city's working-class communities did not vote for Trump in the 2024 election; he received 31.9 percent, while Kamala Harris received 64 percent.
In addition, LA has been at the forefront of protesting Trump’s anti-immigration policies, executive orders, the genocide in Gaza, and racist rhetoric toward people from Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, and beyond.
The Dodgers organization found itself in a unique situation after signing the Japanese star Shohei Ohtani to a ten-year, $700 million contract, which seemed extreme then. However, the organization understood that, in due time, the return on this investment would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in profit, maybe even billions. The team generated $752 million in revenue in 2024 and expects to exceed that in the 2025 season.
The Dodgers roster consists of players from “third-world” countries and working-class communities throughout the U.S. In addition, despite being so highly paid, the players are considered unionized workers. This moment highlights the strife between workers, owners, and capital, which is critical to understand in a capitalist society.
Whose democracy?
Despite the obvious reasons why the team should refuse to visit the White House, it is essential to have a class analysis of this moment and how we view sports. Regardless of how individual players feel about Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-gay, and anti-worker policies, do they have any say in what should be a collective team decision to visit the Oval Office? Did anyone ever consult them? What is clear is that the team's ownership body does not care what they think and feel. The Board of Directors has more in common with Trump and his cabinet of billionaires.
The owners are afraid of their massive fan base, which is overwhelmingly blue-collar and will see and call out the contradictions between the few haves and many have-nots. Therefore, accepting the invitation signals to the players that the owners call the shots. As a result, Dodgers players have been stripped of their political power by visiting the White House.
Not long ago, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts publicly stated he would never visit a Trump White House. In 2018, Mookie Betts declined an invitation to the White House after winning the World Series with the Boston Red Sox. Clearly, both Betts and Roberts, and likely others, were not supporters of Trump or his policies. However, the team's current stance on visiting the Trump White House appears to have shifted.
This type of change usually does not come from the players, who have openly opposed Trump. Trump himself has not altered in any way to attract the support of Betts, Roberts, or anyone sympathetic to the oppressed and forgotten of our society. Instead, it likely stems from those at the top, individuals in leadership positions who maintain close ties to the administration in power because they share the same interests as the status quo and the capitalist system.
The board of billionaires, not workers
The billionaires who own and run the team do not care what the people of LA think about economics and politics; they are looking at how they can benefit from the current political climate. The board of directors is closer to Trump than it is to the working-class people of LA who save every penny possible to attend a game. Who can afford to pay a preposterous $21 for a beer?
The team's board of directors is littered with elite figures who benefit from Trump’s tax plan, geopolitics, and economic policies.
Mark Walter, Chairman of the organization and controlling owner, has a net worth of $6 billion and made contributions to the Democratic Party under Obama. Walter is also the CEO of the investment firm Guggenheim Partners and manages more than $300 billion in assets.
Raul Anaya, a member of the Dodgers Foundation Board, is also the president of Bank of America for Greater Los Angeles. B of A and JPMorgan contributed to Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 and did so again for his second inauguration on January 20th, 2025.
Emily Greenspan is a member of the Dodgers Foundation Board and an active supporter of the American Friends of the Israel Museum.
The Dodgers franchise witnessed a 23 percent increase in value from 2024 to 2025. Going from an estimated value of $5.45 to $7.73 billion. The ownership body, Guggenheim Baseball Management, purchased the team in 2012 for $2.15 billion.
These are three of the fifteen board members who decide whether or not the team should buddy up with Trump. Given their portfolio, a Trump visit is not a surprise.
Standing up for justice
Professional athletes in the U.S. have a rich history of putting sports second and standing up for their beliefs. Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Craig Hodges, and Colin Kaepernick are all examples of people who put the community and society’s interests above their individual sports ambitions. It has always been a struggle for African American and Latino athletes to break through in professional sports. Even after “making it,” they were subjected to the ugliness of a capitalist society with racist fans, teammates, and the sports media world that attempted to tear them down every day.
Today, with the amount of money team owners make from exploiting athletes’ “likeness” through merchandise sales, TV contracts, and so on, players have more leverage than ever. Because of how much players can make, team owners use that and are now more powerful than before.
The Dodgers have three of the sixty-three players from Venezuela in the major leagues: Miguel Rojas, Edgardo Henriquez, and Brusdar Graterol. The U.S. government, Republican and Democratic, has had a war on Venezuela since 1999 because Venezuela took its oil back. Nearly 8,000,000 Venezuelans have been forced out of their homeland.
In Trump’s first two months in office, he deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador’s torture camps without due process. This invitation signals the players to align with the owner's decision without pushback. Therefore, normalize the individual, Democrat or Republican, occupying the White House and accept the status quo, even if it means treating your people with the utmost disrespect and savagery.
In August, it will mark the 80th anniversary of the U.S. military dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. On August 6th, 1945, the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” was dropped on Hiroshima by a B-29 bomber, “Enola Gay.” On August 9th, the second atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki. An estimated 246,000 people died either immediately or down the line. The Dodgers' top players by position are Japanese-born designated hitter and pitcher Shohei Ohtani, starting pitchers Roki Sasaki, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Does visiting the White House, where the plans of bombing Japan were drawn out and discussed, bring contradictory feelings for them? Not to mention, there are still 40,000 U.S. soldiers occupying Japan.
The Dodgers' ownership most likely did not consider that accepting Donald Trump's invitation to the White House and capitulating to his administration might rub these athletes and fans the wrong way. Plus, Mark Walter does not wake up scared that ICE might kidnap members of his family as we do here in LA. One does not become a billionaire by considering how others feel; their drive is solely profit-making. This harsh truth is fully revealed by accepting the invitation during a time when families are being torn apart and deported without due process.
The organization's statement that “this is not political” is condescending. Everything is political, and a Trump White House is at the center of politics in the U.S. and the world. As late-Howard Zinn said:
“You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
Normalizing his administration at a time when we are seeing the highest number of homeless families, children, and attacks on social programs like social security, Medicaid, and others, is signaling to your team and fan base that it does not matter—this is how it is.
This is not an isolated situation. The Lakers visited the White House under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bush was responsible for the illegal invasion of Iraq that resulted in the killing of over one million Iraqis. Plus, the invasion of Afghanistan, where the U.S. killed over one hundred thousand people and destroyed the country. Obama was responsible for the destruction of Libya, the bombing campaigns in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and for deporting more people than any president in history.
Normalizing a war criminal as a “bad president” allows them to get away with the slaughter of civilians across the Middle East and beyond.
The lost players
Trump and his administration's effort to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as a means of creating employment opportunities for others is nothing but falsehood. It represents a movement within the ruling class to reverse all the social progress achieved through the Civil Rights Movement. As a result, Trump ordered U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to “De-Woke The Military.” In doing so, they deleted the only Medal of Honor profile of the only Black soldier who received the award. In addition, he “mistakenly” removed Dodgers legend Jackie Robinson’s Army service in that process.
Today’s athletes who leverage social media have greater reach than ever before. For instance, 15.8 million people watched the World Series featuring the New York Yankees. The deciding Game 5 peaked at 21.3 million viewers, and overall viewership increased by 67 percent compared to the previous year. This national and international attention offers players a platform to address the social issues that many working-class individuals face daily or at least provide a voice akin to that of Colin Kaepernick or Craig Hodges during their playing years.
Naturally, supporting social justice or anti-war issues can provoke a significant backlash from the ruling elite and their stenographers in the corporate-owned media.
The Dodgers' value has doubled since Walter purchased them in 2012, yet 1.3 million people live below the poverty line in LA County. The gap between the rich and the poor is more pronounced than ever, and the diminishing hope among the most disadvantaged is alarming.
LA does not lack resources or assistance—rather, the wealthy hoard all the resources needed to meet people's needs.
The money that Walter and the board use for their vacation trips is our money. If the fans had not purchased a single ticket or piece of merchandise, the board would be bankrupt, consider their investment in the Dodgers a failure, and move on. The LA community invests so much of its money into the team, no matter who the owner is, yet our communities receive nothing in return.
We have a team that submits to Donald Trump and offers the most liberal word salad of a response to justify their visit to the White House while ICE is kidnapping our family members. Meanwhile, the administration continues to send U.S.-made weapons to carry out a colonial genocide in Palestine. If the players refused to “shut up and play,” they could expose the war machine and the interlocking interests of the Military-Sports-Media complex.
This was a really meaningful read. Thanks for your work.
We read your article and you bring up very valid points, most importantly highlighting the fact that the Billionaires who own the Dodgers made the call for their Team. Baseball is a great sport, but within this sport we saw how politics played a role in allowing only certain players in the game. More importantly today, the owners can decide to take their Team, BUT should have given their players the option to show up or not, especially for this president who has not held back with every possible derogatory word for people of color. I go on to say that if the Dodgers were owned by people of the likes of Trump, I would not support the Team. Character and Integrity is something that Trump will never be able to purchase, and forcing people to show up for photo ops, is ridiculous. Trump has reaped what he has sowed, and if people don’t want to be associated with the likes of him, the players should have been given that option. I for one would have had “monctezuma revenge” to avoid showing up and hearing the crap from the criminal in the White House.