What Kind Of American (team) Are You?
Is the triumph of Los Angeles really a triumph of America?
I was lying in bed last night staring at my phone screen as Japanese-born pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto tried to deliver a legendary performance to win the World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers. When Dodgers pitching coach Mark Prior visited Yamamoto on the mound during the 11th inning, he was accompanied by a translator, because Yamamoto doesn’t speak English at a sufficient level.
Yamamoto shares that procedural quirk with the face of the Dodgers franchise, Japanese-born Shohei Ohtani, the best baseball player in the world. Ohtani started Saturday night’s thriller on the mound, and the Dodgers ultimately prevailed over the Toronto Blue Jays.
When the game ended, after I took a moment to reflect on yet another piece of proof that sports is a cruel and unjust realm, I headed over to X to take in some reaction to a game that had captured the continent’s attention for the night.
There, scattered amongst the observations, were some folks claiming this as a win for America over Canada. I suppose the Dodgers do have birthright citizenship on account of their basis in California, but are they really American?