Has there ever been a baseball team so dead-set on disgracing itself as the Los Angeles Dodgers?
The organization that made a publicity stunt out of claiming to defy Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Thursday (ICE has a different story completely), and has a history of celebrating “gay pride” by hosting certified psychos committing sacrilege, has taken a new step toward proving its progressive bona fides.
But it’s a step that borders on the comical.
In partnership with the City of Los Angeles, the Dodgers have committed $1 million toward direct financial assistance for families of immigrants impacted by recent events in the region. Additional community efforts to be announced in the coming days.
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 20, 2025
In a laughably self-righteous news release published Friday, the Dodgers announced the team is committing $1 million toward “direct financial assistance for families of immigrants impacted by recent events in the region.”
“Recent events in the region” covers a multitude of sins when it comes to Los Angeles and its nearly criminally incompetent Democratic governance.
There were the January wildfires, which destroyed thousands of homes and exposed the ineptitude of Mayor Karen Bass — not to mention California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
And there’s the recent round of rioting sparked by progressive resistance to President Donald Trump’s efforts to simply enforce American laws (exposing Bass and Newsom again).
Will the Dodgers lose American fans over this?
But the Los Angeles Dodgers are stepping into the breach by offering a magnanimous $1 million donation to “families of immigrants.”
Notably, the Dodgers make no effort to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Nor does the team explain why some in the Los Angeles area are worthy of its largesse while Americans who happen to have been born in their own country are apparently not.
But that’s par for the leftist course.
What’s really funny is the Dodgers actually going to the trouble of publishing a news release about a whopping $1 million donation and pretending the team is taking a principled stand.
For the MLB team, that’s not even tip money.
In 2024, the Dodgers had a payroll of $241 million, according to Sporting News.
That paid for a team that ended up winning the World Series in October, so the fans can’t really complain, but it shows how little, comparatively speaking, that ballyhooed $1 million actually is.
And that $241 million payroll is just one year. In 2023, the team inked a 10-year contract with multipositional star Shohei Ohtani worth $700,000,000 — or $70 million per year.
As the news website Bleacher Report noted at the time, that works out to $432,000 per game. So, for the price of less than three Shohei Ohtani games — three, over 10 years — the Dodgers can puff out their leftist chests and pretend to be friends of the oh-so-innocent victims of a Republican president’s efforts to do the job voters hired him for.
(In fairness to the Dodgers, the Japanese-born Ohtani is himself an immigrant, so the team was arguably already doing its part, immigrant-family-wise.)
On the social media platform X, the announcement drew some of the kind of supportive responses the Dodgers were no doubt looking for, but it also drew a lot of barbed commentary:
So you’re assisting in the financial assistance of hiding criminal illegal aliens?
— Jammles (@jammles9) June 20, 2025
Pathetic and unAmerican.
How much did you donate to the families victimized by illegals?— Ryan (@Ryan_In_Mi) June 20, 2025
Hey @Dodgers, how much financial assistance are you committing to Angel Families like Laken Riley’s and Rachel Morin’s family?? https://t.co/kKn6wZY8Qo pic.twitter.com/ZWUSggmA8z
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 20, 2025
This isn’t to argue the Dodgers should be donating more to illegal immigration, of course.
It’s only pointing out that it’s just another day for a team with a documented history of showboating for a leftist audience — in this case, generating headlines on the cheap for supposedly standing up to the Trump White House.
It’s pathetic, and it’s ignoring the very real lesson Major League Baseball — and all professional sports — should have taken from the Black Lives Matter madness of the George Floyd riots era:
The only way for sports teams to win at playing politics is to stay out of the game altogether.
The Dodgers are apparently determined not to do that. And they’re determined to disgrace themselves at the same time.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
