Even if it takes nearly a century, this Los Angeles native proves it is never too late to start rooting for the Dodgers.
Born and raised in Boyle Heights, 99-year-old Micaela Alvarez has always been a football person — Rams and Chargers — while baseball was her sister’s thing. But this year, during the Dodgers’ 2025 championship run, something flipped.
“It was this season. At 99 years old she just became a Dodgers fan,” her daughter Alicia Alvarez told KTLA. “My aunt, she’s 97, has been a Dodger fan forever and always tried to get her to watch, but my mom just wasn’t into baseball.”
What finally pulled her in? The new wave of Dodgers stars.
“Honestly, it was Ohtani and Yamamoto and Sasaki,” Alicia said, laughing. “She loves Japanese and Korean culture. She watches all the Korean novelas. She even started to teach herself Japanese a few years ago. When those players came on board, I think that’s what caught her attention.”
However, it was another player who eventually and truly won her heart.
“She just loves Mookie,” Alicia said. “She loves his smile, his spirit, the way he treats people. She said he’s just a wonderful person.” So for Halloween, the 99-year-old decided she would debut as Mookie Betts.
This is not unusual behavior for her family, Alicia explained. Micaela dresses up every year and refuses to tell anyone what the costume will be.
Past hits include Oscar De La Hoya, Charlie Chaplin and even a mermaid. This year, Micaela wanted to throw her daughters off, so she told them she planned to be a skier.
“She said, ‘Can you find me some skis?’ just to mess with us,” Alicia said. “But then she told me, ‘I want to be Mookie Betts.’”
From there, the women in the family went to work. Alicia found baseball pants at Goodwill. A friend lent them a Dodgers jersey. They hunted down socks and a belt — “it’s hard to find a blue belt,” Alicia said — and her sister made the face mask. Micaela’s son-in-law lent his old baseball helmet. The bat was easy.
“She’s always had a bat,” Alicia joked. “For safety.”
On Halloween afternoon in Montebello, the family gathered for pie and coffee — nothing big, just the usual. Then Micaela came out dressed head to toe as No. 50: Dodgers jersey tucked into white pants, high socks, chains, helmet, mask and bat.
“She surprises us every year and the grandkids look forward to it,” Alicia said. “This one just made everybody roll over laughing.”
They drove her to Monterey Park to surprise her 97-year-old sister — the lifelong Dodgers fan who’s been trying to convert her for decades. That sister keeps a Will Smith bobblehead in front of the TV. Micaela keeps a Mookie Betts bobblehead in front of hers.
And yes, even at 99, Micaela watched the entire World Series-clinching game.
“She had to get up a couple times because it was too much for her,” Alicia said. “But she finished the game. She was too tired to celebrate, so she did her nightly rosary and said it for the Dodgers.”
Alicia also explained her mother’s true-grit Los Angeles story — a woman born in Boyle Heights in 1926 to parents from Mexico who worked the fields and cleaned houses, who survived tuberculosis as a child in the old L.A. County General Hospital, who later beat lung cancer, who raised four daughters and moved with them from Boyle Heights to Montebello.
Micaela was one of four sisters. Alicia’s father, who recently passed, was one of 12 children who grew up in the house next to Micaela’s. By the time all 16 children had grown up, Micaela and two of her sisters had married three of the Alvarez boys.
“They played together, they worked together, and they lived together their whole lives,” Alicia said.
Now, surrounded by her daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren — all still living within a few blocks of one another — Micaela continues to play on. “She’s incredibly healthy, her mind is all there, and she still wants to have fun,” Alicia said. “We see her every day. We just wanted to share the joy.”
And after nearly a century of cheering for other L.A. teams, Micaela — survivor of the Depression and countless Dodgers heartbreaks she never knew — finally let herself fall for the Dodgers, just in time to watch them become champions again.
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