Rooting for the Wrong Team
Watching the Dodgers win and wondering why it doesn’t feel like victory
Right now fireworks are erupting. Neighbors are hooting so loud it sounds as if they are right outside our window. The Dodgers have just won the World Series, again. I don’t watch sports. The list of things I rather do is long and includes: reading a book, making art, and washing my hair.
However, even I got caught up in this latest Series—particularly after Game 3, which stretched on for 18 arduous innings, making it one of the longest games in World Series history. In all honesty, I didn’t watch that game either. I only heard about its record breaking length the following day when it was covered by NPR. Still, it made me cock my head with curiosity. I don’t love sports—which I think is one of the only places heterosexual men allow themselves to openly express emotions—but I do love an epic story. And the 2025 World Series had all the right ingredients.
Beginning with the fact that it actually was a World series, with the teams representing not only cities but countries: the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. Blue Jay fans at my daughter’s preschool didn’t just wear Blue Jay hats; they wore Canadian colors. Red sweatshirts with big white maple leaves. White track pants with red stripes down the sides. This combined with the fact that the Blue Jays hadn’t won a Series in 32 years and that they were playing against Major League Baseball’s most bankrolled team, made them an underdog of Might Duck proportions.
But from what I gathered the Blue Jays did not play like underdogs this Series. They played like champions. Dominating in most of the seven games, even the ones they lost. So it was a surprise to all when in the 9th inning of seventh game (which I did deign to watch), Miguel Rojas of the Dodgers hit a home run to tie a game that, until then, had been led by the Blue Jays.
“Who do you want to win?” my husband asked me as we watched Rojas run around the bases on his iPad in bed.
“The Dodgers,” I said, surprised by his question. I may not love sports but I love LA and I’m not Canadian.
“Why? Who do you want to win?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Some part of me would love to imagine Trump’s face after the Blue Jays won.”
I thought about the Canadian trade deal Trump backed out of recently because he’d been mocked by a Canadian ad, and realized that I wanted to imagine Trump’s sulking face after a Blue Jay win too. Suddenly, I had mixed feelings as the Dodgers pulled ahead with another home run by Will Smith and Yamamoto struck out one Blue Jay after the next in the 11th and final inning. When the Dodgers won, cementing their dynasty, the city broke out the champagne. Right now, I even hear police sirens racing through the streets in anticipation of ecstatic riots. But somewhere my heart is still with the crowd in Toronto’s Rogers Stadium, heartbroken, rubbing their tired eyes as they shuffled back to their cars, wondering why America always has to win.
I watched most of the games and I was sad when Toronto lost.
I was rooting for them.
As a Torontonian artist living and working in Los Angeles, I'm pleasantly surprised to see such a nuanced and sympathetic write-up about this 2025 World Series victory for the Dodgers. Thanks Mieke! After such an epic and evenly-contested World Series – which the baseball media is already asking out loud whether it's the greatest World Series in history – I can tell you that I'm grieving over this narrow Blue Jays defeat. The entire country of Canada is grieving, actually (though for perspective I should say that it's 'sports-grieving'). American fans may not know, but this 2025 Blue Jays playoff run was a galvanizing uniting moment for the entire country of Canada.
I have some experience in this, as I've been a life-long Blue Jays fan for 40 years and counting. I even created a Blue Jays playoff-themed moment with one of my LED art works:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DQSHQFGkWd1/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
You are right that this Series had a geo-political dimension to it, with the shocking diplomatic and economic hostilities (originating from the Trump White House) forming part of the backdrop. Which added to the tension of this already nail-biting World Series.
And you are right to ask "why America always has to win". More specifically, I would add "why do the LA Dodgers always have to win?"... In what is now becoming an oligarchical gilded age in America, the Dodgers organization now represents the most powerful form of well-financed, intelligently run, politically connected sports ownership group. For one thing, the Dodgers are partially owned by Guggenheim Partners (CEO Mark Walters), a financial firm that has an investment in GEO Group, a private prison company that runs ICE facilities, and has links to Palantir, the firm behind ICE’s data-tracking system.
You can bet that the 2025 Dodgers will be visiting Trump at the White House, just as they did after their 2024 World Series victory.
Aside from those investments and connections, the Dodgers organization is also staffed with top-tier baseball, legal, and financial executives who are talented enough to find financial loopholes (like deferments) that help them sign high-dollar players like Shohei Ohtani. The Dodgers also enjoy the economic, geographic, and demographic advantages of being a big market team in a coastal city that has close proximity to Japan. Which also helps them recruit and sign big-dollar Japanese players like (again) Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki – all of whom played crucial roles in securing this 2025 WS victory for the Dodgers. Teams in, say, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Miami, Chicago, and yes, Toronto, can't even hope to sign the otherworldly talented Japanese stars that the Dodgers are accumulating.
Toronto is a big market team too, and the 2025 World Series was more of 'goliath vs goliath' rather than 'David vs. goliath'. And better luck and execution at many points in the 2025 World Series would likely have swung the result in Toronto's favor – many neutral baseball analysts said that the Blue Jays outplayed the Dodgers throughout the series, up until the final innings of Game 7.
But still, it needs to be acknowledged that the L.A. Dodgers had the institutional clout to defeat almost any opponent.
Which helps answer your question of why this 2025 Dodgers World Series win doesn't feel like a victory for some people.