Dodgers Visit White House, Trump Compares Ohtani to Babe Ruth During Rose Garden Ceremony

The Los Angeles Dodgers celebrated their 2025 World Series title at the White House on Thursday, July 23, using an off-day on their East Coast road trip to make the trip to Washington, D.C.

It's the second straight year Trump has hosted the Dodgers after their back-to-back championships, and the third White House visit for the franchise this decade. Los Angeles also visited in 2021 under President Biden after winning it all in 2020, according to the New York Post.

During the Rose Garden ceremony, Dodgers owner Mark Walter presented Trump with a jersey numbered 47, a nod to his status as the 47th president, along with a World Series championship ring, the Post reported. Trump spoke for roughly 20 minutes, calling the Dodgers' win over the Toronto Blue Jays "among the most thrilling championships in the history of the sport."

Trump's Ohtani-Ruth Comparison

Trump spent a chunk of his remarks on Shohei Ohtani, the two-way superstar who won his third straight unanimous league MVP last season with a franchise-record 55 home runs, according to Fox News.

"No player has ever earned more than one unanimous league MVP, except for an international legend named Shohei Ohtani," Trump said, according to Fox News. He went on to compare Ohtani's dual pitching-hitting ability to Babe Ruth, calling Ruth's 1920 trade from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees "the worst trade in the history of sports."

The numbers back up why the comparison gets made. Ohtani hit 99 home runs combined across the 2024 and 2025 seasons and led the National League with a 1.025 OPS over that span, per Fox News. He sat out pitching in 2024 following elbow surgery but returned to the mound in 2025 with a 2.87 ERA and 11.9 strikeouts per nine innings, matching a strikeout rate he'd already posted in 2022 when he led the American League in that category.

Ohtani is the only player in MLB history with more than 300 plate appearances and more than 40 innings pitched in six separate seasons. Ruth did it twice and never stole 50 bases in a season, a distinction Fox News noted directly.

Not Everyone Made the Trip, Not Everyone Was Happy About It

Three Dodgers players skipped the visit. Mookie Betts, Edgardo Henriquez, and Kike Hernandez were absent, citing logistical reasons, according to the New York Post. No source reported any political explanation from the three players themselves.

The visit wasn't without controversy back home. Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke criticized the team's decision to attend, calling it "tone deaf" given ongoing tensions over ICE immigration raids in the Los Angeles area, according to Breitbart. Los Angeles has been a flashpoint for immigration enforcement clashes this year, and a professional sports team's optics matter to fans who see the White House visit as an implicit endorsement of the administration's broader agenda. Plaschke's objection reflects a real and reasonable discomfort among some Dodgers fans, not just partisan sniping.

Still, most of the roster showed up anyway, sticking with a tradition that championship teams visit the White House regardless of who occupies it, a norm the Post noted has held even as such visits have grown more politically charged across sports leagues during the Trump era.

Separately, Breitbart reported that Dodgers pitcher Blake Treinen said in June that Major League Baseball had chastised him for putting Charlie Kirk's name on his hat last season, honoring the Turning Point USA founder after his assassination. This detail surfaced in Breitbart's coverage of the team's broader political friction points this year.

What's Left Unsettled

The scheduling itself reveals a small story. The Post reported the Dodgers had gone silent for months on whether they'd visit at all, partly because their season-opening road trip landed in Washington but all three games against the Nationals had afternoon start times that made a White House stop impractical. It took until this road trip, months later, for the visit to actually happen.

No outlet in this reporting cycle detailed on-the-record comments from Betts, Henriquez, or Hernandez explaining their absence beyond "logistical reasons," leaving open whether personal scheduling, discomfort with the visit, or something else entirely kept them away.