You can’t separate sports from politics. Just ask the L.A. Dodgers
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Sports offer an escape, an oasis, a relief from the anxiety and troubles of day-to-day living. There’s the competition, of course. There’s also a reassuring certainty.
Clear-cut winners and losers. Scores meticulously kept. Rules and boundaries that are officiated and maintained as firmly and precisely as a chalked third base line.
In short, none of the compromise or messy ambiguities of daily life, which is part of the appeal and also part of the fantasy.
And it is fantasy to try to divorce sports from the times we live in and the events that unfold, sometimes frightfully, beyond the comfortable confines of the stadium and arena.
Take the Los Angeles Dodgers and the team’s fitful response to the immigration raids terrorizing large swaths of its fan base.
The team, one of Southern California’s most revered (and lucrative) institutions, caved last week amid a growing public outcry and committed $1 million to help families affected by the Trump administration’s heavy-handed immigration policies. Further initiatives, the organization promised, are on the way.
Escapism only goes so far.
“Sports are political through and through,” said Jules Boykoff, a former pro soccer player-turned-political scientist. “and to deny it is to deny reality.”
In their first public response to the immigration raids that have swept through Los Angeles, the Dodgers announced they have committed $1 million toward assistance for families of immigrants.
Amy Bass, a professor of sport studies at Manhattanville University and the author of numerous works on the subject, agreed.
“Sport is part of our cultural, political, social and economic landscape,” Bass said. “It is an industry that pays people. It is an industry that entertains people. It is an industry that expresses some of our greatest moments and our most tragic moments.
“There is nothing,” she said, “that you can’t talk about through the lens of sport.”
Or shout about and argue over, as the case may be.
The Dodgers’ gesture struck many as too little, too late; an unforced error, if you will.
“That’s the best way to describe how the Boys in Blue have acted,” my columnizing colleague Gustavo Arellano wrote, “as the city emblazoned on their hats and road jerseys battles Donald Trump’s toxic alphabet soup of federal agencies that have conducted immigration sweeps across Los Angeles over the past two weeks.”
The Dodgers were studiously vague in last week’s capitulation, er, announcement of $1 million in good will payments. No mention, much less condemnation, of the brutality that ICE has employed in some of its enforcement actions. No reference to the parents separated from their children. No acknowledgment of the innocents — including U.S. citizens — swept up in some of the Trump administration’s indiscriminate raids.
“What’s happening in Los Angeles has reverberated among thousands upon thousands of people,” said Stan Kasten, the team president, in a masterwork of opacity and euphemism. “We believe that by committing resources and taking action, we will continue to support and uplift the communities of Greater Los Angeles.”
But, really, is it any surprise the team would first duck, then seek cover in such platitudes?
Lest we forget, the Dodgers are first and foremost a business, just like every other professional sports franchise. Michael Jordan may or may not have uttered the quote famously attributed to him — “Republicans buy sneakers, too” — as a reason for pro athletes and their teams to steer clear of politics. But it speaks resoundingly to a bottom-line truism of the sporting world.
Put another way, yes, the Dodgers have a substantial and remunerative following in the Latino community, which is very much under siege. But Trump devotees also fill a lot of seats and buy a lot of Dodger Dogs.
If we’re being honest, how many of those who root for the Dodgers — or any sports franchise, for that matter — would be more than willing to yield the moral high ground if it means a winning season and championship? Righteousness, after all, isn’t reflected in the standings.
So what’s a cross-pressured, community-grounded, profit-seeking sports organization to do?
Events, spiraling downward by the day, may have left the Dodgers little choice.
“The more people are affected, maybe I shouldn’t say affected but traumatized, by what’s happening on the streets of L.A. and the neighborhoods of L.A. ... this left the Dodgers with much less room in which to try to shimmy through without saying anything,” said Boykoff, who teaches political science at Oregon’s Pacific University. “The circumstances in a lot of ways forced their hand.”
The Trump administration claimed the sweeps were aimed at criminals, but data shows otherwise.
So the organization weighed in — belatedly, tepidly — leaving very few people happy or satisfied.
Little surprise there.
If we’re looking for a bright side, perhaps it’s this: Maybe instead of pretending sports exist in a pristine, politics-free vacuum, we can acknowledge their centrality to our daily lives and find, if not commonality, at least a common ground for discussion and debate.
“We can talk about history, we can talk about economics, we can talk about social change,” Bass said. “We can talk about how sport actually move political needles.”
Not, of course, on the playing field. But in the stands, in sports bars, at tailgate parties, on talk radio, wherever fans of various cloth gather.
“The more we recognize it,” Bass said, “the more that we can see that sport can actually provide this landscape for having very difficult conversations through a place that brings a lot of different kinds of people into the same space.”
It may seem far-fetched at a time of such deep and abiding divisions. But what are sports about if not hope and aspiration?
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