For as long as I can remember, my family has been fans of the Dodgers. I remember baseball being sprinkled throughout my childhood; my dad wouldn’t let me change the TV when the game was on, and when he took me to games, I would beg to get cotton candy. However, this season has been special for a lot of reasons.
Starting off with the obvious one: Shohei Ohtani, the greatest baseball player of all time, is on the team and is in the unique position of being both a pitcher and batter. I don’t think I need to explain further why he’s so cool. Give him a Google, and his stats from just this past month will speak for themselves.
Besides Ohtani, though, the lineup is still absolutely stacked. It includes star pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto (our 2025 MVP!), Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, catcher Will Smith, Teoscar Hernandez, Tommy Edman, Kike Hernandez, Miguel Rojas, Andy Pages, and on and on. Each of them has made significant accomplishments throughout their careers and contributed to the team this season in their own unique way.
Game 7 of the 2025 World Series, besides being the game that gave the Dodgers their ninth World Series title, was also pitcher Clayton Kershaw’s last game before retirement. Kershaw has been with the team for 18 seasons, and he was my childhood baseball hero. But my favorite thing about this team is that you can see how much LA loves them and unites behind them.
I can think of many times I’ve talked to the little kids about the Dodgers while volunteering during summer tennis camp, with them yelling about Ohtani or Freeman. I can also think of the times I’ve gone to CPK while the game has been on and seen people seated at the bar starting up conversations with total strangers about the game. On this campus alone, I talk to my teachers about the Dodgers (shoutout to Ms. Yu and Dr. Nelle! Sorry about the Padres).
I’ve lived in Los Angeles pretty much my whole life, and with the Dodgers and LA being so intrinsically tied together, they’ve always stuck with me, even if I wasn’t actually in the city at the time. Maybe it’s because of how the Dodgers, with their players who come from all over the world, represent this city so well.
Those who come to LA join the melting pot of all the different types of people here, joining a multicultural community where you can see so many different parts of the world in one place. So many people come to LA to chase their dreams and find success, which is why this city is so famous, why the idea of it can sometimes feel so bright and overwhelming that you can’t look it dead in the eye.
The Dodgers, as the current shining stars of baseball, encapsulate this so well. They’re famous everywhere; the iconic LA logo can be found almost anywhere on Earth. That’s not to say that this World Series has been easy for them, or that they’ll always be great, just like how Los Angeles is very much not the perfect city that people may want it to be.
However, the Dodgers and LA will always represent the same thing for me: home.
