Toronto\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Louis Acosta, a Dodgers fan from Santa Clarita, flew to Toronto on Friday to support his home town team for their fifth World Series appearance in the last 9 years. During Game 1 at the Rogers Centre, he proudly wore his Dodgers shirt and cap amid the opening ceremonies.<\/p>\n
Prior to the game, Acosta visited a bar inside the stadium where a Blue Jays fan offered to buy him a beer after noticing his L.A. team gear. \u201cIt was weird,\u201d Acosta said laughing. \u201cThe guy didn\u2019t mind that I was a Dodgers fan as long as I hadn\u2019t voted for Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n
It might seem odd that the World Series and politics are so entwined this year. Baseball games are often where people go to escape arguments about the polarized state of our country and enjoy rooting for their favorite players and teams. But this season, Canadians are baseball mad, fanatical about supporting the Blue Jays, Canada\u2019s only Major League Baseball team. They are also politically angry for reasons that are clear.<\/p>\n
Since President Trump was inaugurated in January, he\u2019s gone out of his way to antagonize Canadians, suggesting that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, referring to former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a \u201cGovernor\u201d and, most importantly for Canada\u2019s economic well-being, imposing steep tariffs on Canadian products coming into the U.S.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, Trump announced an additional 10% tariff on Canada, imposed simply because he didn\u2019t like a television ad. The commercial, paid for by the province of Ontario to air during the World Series, features President Reagan\u2019s anti-tariff rhetoric from a 1987 radio address. And as the U.S. is Canada\u2019s biggest export market, the economic sanctions on Canada are starting to bite.<\/p>\n
While there\u2019s a complex mix of personalities in all countries, Canadians are generally considered to be friendly and thoughtful, and not prone to outbursts of nationalistic anger. At sporting events you rarely see groups of Canadians shouting \u201cWe\u2019re number one!\u201d <\/p>\n
At Game 1 on Friday night, which the Blue Jays handily won 11 to 4, Toronto fan Riley Keast explained how he saw the difference between Canadians and Americans.<\/p>\n
\u201cHistorically Canadians have had what you might call a soft-patriotism, where there is not a lot of flag waving and aggressiveness about it,\u201d said Keast, who works downtown in Toronto\u2019s financial industry. \u201cWith the Trump tariffs it all changed and now you see Canada\u2019s strong patriotism.\u201d<\/p>\n
A walk through Toronto\u2019s neighborhoods reveals signs of Canadians\u2019 pride, and their willingness to fight back against what many see as an unnecessary humiliation. Signs on grocery stores windows read \u201cProudly Canadian\u201d and inside the store there are notes that indicate which products are made inside its borders. At liquor stores run by the Ontario Liquor Control Board, a government agency, there are shelves of \u201cUSA Alternatives,\u201d where American wines \u2014 including California varietals \u2014 used to be sold.<\/p>\n
One mother at the game, who had her and her daughter\u2019s faces painted with the Blue Jays logo, joked that she\u2019s \u201cnot losing any sleep over Donald Trump.\u201d When I stopped to talk to a construction worker who was wearing a Blue Jays\u2019 hoodie, he declared proudly, \u201cThis is not a series between Toronto and Los Angeles, this is Canada against the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obviously, he didn\u2019t think Canadians would soon be in combat with their American counterparts, but his comments weren\u2019t entirely hyperbolic either. There is an historical context to the current tension. Alan Taylor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history from the University of Virginia, told me that Trump is not the first American president to talk about the possibility of annexing Canada. In fact, in the 19th century the idea was fairly commonplace.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the United States and Britain and Canada were allies after World War I and World War II, and we needed each other during the Cold War, this idea of annexation vanished,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cSo why Trump has decided to embrace this in such an insulting way towards the people of Canada as if they don\u2019t value their own sovereignty shows his utter ignorance of Canada. To be blunt, he\u2019s unstable.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Blue Jays hats and jerseys were ubiquitous throughout Toronto during the team\u2019s first World Series home games since 1993. Women had fingernails painted with the logo, and a festive atmosphere prevailed across Canada\u2019s largest city and throughout the country.<\/p>\n
During the games, no one booed when the American or Canadian national anthems were played, contrary to how U.S. fans booed \u201cO Canada\u201d during the 4 Nations Face-Off in February, and at various sporting events since. The rudest that Blue Jays fans got was chanting \u201cWe don\u2019t need you\u201d when Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani was up to bat, a reference to Ohtani choosing L.A. over Toronto when he signed as a free agent in 2023. Technically, the chant isn\u2019t accurate, as the Blue Jays managed only four hits during their Game 2 loss.<\/p>\n
This week, back in Los Angeles for Games 3, 4 and 5, the Dodgers are playing not just against Toronto, but against \u201cCanada\u2019s team.\u201d And interestingly, both first basemen have Canadian roots. One is Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the Blue Jays Gold Glover who was born in 1999 while his father starred for the now-defunct Montreal Expos (who moved to Washington, D.C., in 2005). The other is Dodgers 2024 World Series MVP Freddie Freeman, who was born in Southern California but has dual citizenship, as his parents were raised in Canada. Freeman even played for Canada in the World Baseball Classic in 2017 and 2023 to honor his mother, who died in 2000.<\/p>\n
Dodgers fan Louis Acosta said that if he makes it to this week\u2019s games in Chavez Ravine, he\u2019s going to be just as generous to the Canadians in town to cheer on the Blue Jays as their fans were to him in Toronto. \u201cIf I see someone with a Blue Jays hat, I\u2019m going to reach out my hand and say, \u2018Welcome to Los Angeles. Can I buy you a beer?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Kelly Candaele produced the documentary \u201cA League of Their Own,\u201d about his mother\u2019s years playing in the All-American Girl\u2019s Professional Baseball League. He was born in Vancouver, Canada. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Toronto\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Louis Acosta, a Dodgers fan from Santa Clarita, flew to Toronto on Friday to support his home town…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[21263,12672,21262,7363,21264,423,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,21265,11466,826,427,13431,1519,4470,72],"class_list":{"0":"post-28442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-blue-jays-fan","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-canadians","11":"tag-country","12":"tag-dodgers-fan","13":"tag-game","14":"tag-la","15":"tag-la-headlines","16":"tag-la-news","17":"tag-los-angeles","18":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","19":"tag-los-angeles-news","20":"tag-los-angeles-times","21":"tag-louis-acosta","22":"tag-sign","23":"tag-store","24":"tag-team","25":"tag-toronto","26":"tag-trump","27":"tag-world-series","28":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}