They lined Vin Scully Avenue outside Dodger Stadium, roaring. They poured from commuter trains, blasting “I Love L.A.” They donned Dodger caps before dawn and drove from neighborhoods torn by fire and ICE.
The morning air reeked of fireworks and hot dogs. Outside Disney Hall, the sidewalk was a blue-and-white sea of jubilation, a dozen or more bodies deep.
Tens of thousands of raucous fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers flooded the city’s downtown on Monday, waving flags, cheering from tree limbs, hoisting babies and shouting in every tongue of Southern California. It was a celebration not only of the team’s hard-won victory in the 2025 World Series — its second consecutive title in two years — but also of the city’s own survival after a gut-wrenching year.
Officials estimated that more than 250,000 people attended the morning parade that rolled through downtown as Dodger players and their families waved from double-decker buses. An afternoon rally at Dodger Stadium was sold out.
The event was a catharsis in a year that began with wildfires that devastated much of the region, including the Los Angeles enclave of Pacific Palisades and the community of Altadena, and erupted again this summer with an onslaught of raids by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. By the time baseball season ended, protests had left downtown Los Angeles half-covered in anti-ICE graffiti and thousands of National Guard troops had come and gone from Southern California.
Against that backdrop, the Dodgers’s victory over the Toronto Blue Jays in a grueling 7-game World Series was a kind of metaphor for Southern California’s own perseverance. Like the city of Los Angeles itself, the team is a multicultural juggernaut with people from all over the world.
“When people in Los Angeles look at the Dodgers, they’re looking in the mirror,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former longtime Los Angeles County supervisor and city councilman. “It’s more than just wins and losses and strikes and balls.”
During the immigration raids, as the team’s owners struggled to balance the fury of its heavily Latino fan base against the perils of angering the White House, some Latino fans briefly pushed for a boycott. On Monday, that Latino fan base turned out in force.
“ICE knows if they try to come in here, they’ll never get out,” Nick Plasencia, 64, a Lyft driver from Eagle Rock joked as the crowd jostled.
Brian Vega, 31, a construction worker from the Los Angeles suburb of Maywood, said he woke up early to bring his wife and four children downtown to see the Dodgers. His mind was on his father, who had been deported to Mexico in April. Aunts and uncles, Dodger fans all, missed the parade, too, out of fear of ICE agents, he said.
“If they could be here,” Mr. Vega said, “they would.”
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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