CNN
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The Los Angeles Dodgers say they have accepted an invite from Donald Trump to visit the White House to celebrate the team’s 2024 World Series win.
The Dodgers made the announcement on social media Tuesday, upkeeping a longstanding tradition of champions meeting the president. The team announced it will visit the White House on April 7, before visiting the Capitol Hill the following day.
“The Dodgers look forward to visiting the White House and celebrating our title,” the team said on X.
The team earned its invite to the White House after defeating the New York Yankees in a dramatic Game 5 in October, staging the biggest comeback to clinch a World Series in baseball history.
There were, however, questions whether the Dodgers would attend a White House visit for several reasons, not least because manager Dave Roberts previously indicated he would decline an invite in a 2019 interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Trump also publicly criticized Roberts in 2018, but the Dodgers’ manager now says he intends to visit the White House next month.
“It wasn’t a formal conversation that we had as a ballclub,” Roberts said, per ESPN. “It’s certainly a huge honor to get the invitation to the White House. It allows us to celebrate our 2024 championship. To my understanding, every World Series champion gets that honor, so it’s a great honor for all of us.”
The Dodgers’ invite to the White House also comes amid controversy regarding franchise legend Jackie Robinson, who won a championship with the team in 1955 and who served in the US military during World War II.
A Department of Defense webpage describing the baseball and civil rights icon’s military service was temporarily taken down last week, amid the order for all diversity, equity and inclusion-related content to be removed from Pentagon websites.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell later said in a video posted to X that some content was incorrectly taken offline.
“When content is either mistakenly removed – or if it is maliciously removed – we continue to work quickly to restore it,” he said. The page has since been republished.
“I think I’m happy that the page went back up,” Roberts told reporters, per ESPN. “I have my strong opinions on DEI and all that stuff, but that’s another scrum.”
Notably, Dodgers star Mookie Betts declined an invite to the White House after winning the World Series with the Boston Red Sox in 2018, but he has not yet said whether he would reject another invite this time around.
Joe Biden last welcomed the Dodgers to the White House in 2021, marking a return to a regular tradition that was interrupted by Covid-19.
