From far away, an L.A. couple grapple with all-too-familiar debate

Is it OK to celebrate the Dodgers after the team was silent on ICE raids? Folks at home are asking too

- GUSTAVO ARELLANO

FANS LINED the streets downtown to celebrate another World Series victory.

(KAYLA BARTKOWSK Los Angeles Times)

Out in Wisconsin's state capital, where the orange leaves are falling and every other person seems to wear the red and white of the University of Wisconsin Badgers, the pride and pain of rooting for the Dodgers in 2025 played out in the household of Carolina Sarmiento and Revel Sims.

They're urban planning professors, Southern California natives — he’s from Eagle Rock, she’s from Santa Ana; they met at UCLA — and longtime friends of mine who have lived in Madison for a decade but are still involved in immigrant and anti-gentrification activism back home. I visited them recently as part of a speaking tour of Midwestern colleges and found myself in the middle of a debate that passed through the lives of too many people we know back home.

It’s one that’s unlikely to completely fade away no matter how many rings and parades the Boys in Blue rack up:

Is it OK to, well, revel in this year’s World Series champs?

On one hand, the Dodgers won back-to-back titles for their first time ever and became the first team to do so in a generation. The squad looked like Los Angeles at its best: people from across the world who set aside their egos to win and bring joy to millions of Angelenos in a most difficult year for the City of Angels.

L.A., a city long synonymous with winning — the weather, the teams, the people, the food — has suffered a terrible losing streak that started with the deadly and catastrophic Eaton and Palisades fires and continues with mass deportations that the Trump administration vows to escalate.

That's where the rub came for Sarmiento and other Dodgers fans. For them, the actions and inactions of the team this year have been indefensible.

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