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Los Angeles is accustomed to championship parades — but this one has been a long time coming.
When the 2024 World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers begin their celebratory journey from City Hall to Fifth and Flower streets, at 11 a.m. Friday, Nov. 1, it will represent much more than the triumphant denouement to a title-winning season.
For Walker Buehler, the parade will represent redemption. For Shohei Ohtani, his freedom from futility. For Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and the entire Dodgers organization, a salve from too many past postseason failures.
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For franchise icon Clayton Kershaw, a dream fulfilled after being too long denied — stolen, even.
And for the thousands of fans lining the parade route and filling Dodger Stadium for an encore celebration, it will represent years of heartbreak, despair, longing and frustration being washed away at last.
As the parade drew closer, Downtown L.A. became a sea of blue: T-shirts, air horns, blue Mardi Gras beads, plastic gold chains, hand-held flags. And quite literally thousands of Dodgers caps.
“It’s really fun,” Bellarose Vasquez, 14, said as she held a vuvuzela, a noisemaker. “I just like blowing into it and making noise.”
She stood next to her aunt Sylvia Vasquez who held a Dodgers flag and wore a shirt that read “Job is finished.”
“It’s just really cool to see people from a lot of places come together, Bellarose said. “We were coming here and somebody said they came from San Diego and people from all parts and people that you don’t know they all just come and it’s sort of a family so it’s really cool to see that.”
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This parade, this celebration 36 years in the making, will, fans hope, also represent something else: Hope that this is just the beginning. Hope that these new boys of summer, who defeated the Yankees in five games in the World Series, have turned into the titans of autumn. That their beloved Dodgers — finally free from the mockery they endured over their 2020 COVID-tinged title and the burden they shouldered over too frequently falling short of expectations — will begin a run even more dominant than the last dozen years.
And that parades in Los Angeles will become as synonymous with autumn as Halloween, Dia de los Muertos and the Santa Ana Winds.
“I don’t want to say this is once a lifetime,” said Jesus Anaya of Laverne, who came to the parade with his 18-year-old son Lorenzo, “because they’re going to do it again.
“But it’s a memory, right? It’s all about these special moments.”
It may be reasonable for the uninitiated to view this all as hyperbole, or overwrought sentimentality.
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But that perspective belies what it took to get here and why it means so much to Los Angeles — and Dodgers fans everywhere.
For much of the Dodgers’ nearly 150-year history, they had been beloved, scrappy underdogs. They began in Brooklyn. During the first have of the 20th century, the Dodgers, like the borough they called home, were often upstaged by their glitzy, star-studded intracity rivals, the New York Yankees. The Yankees may have played in the blue-collar Bronx — with the Giants playing in Manhattan — but it was the American League titans who symbolized the brightlights of Broadway.
The Dodgers were “Dem Bums,” as their fans lovingly called them. They made the World Series nine times during those years and almost always lost — usually to the Yankees. Their lone World Series win, by the original boys of summer, came in 1955 against the Yankees. Brooklyn was euphoric.
But before the decade ended, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. Brooklyn, which had lived and died with the Dodgers, were heartbroken. Ebbets Field was torn down, the Mets took over Queens a few years later and the Dodgers settled into their new home. But many longtime Dodgers fans remained loyal.
In Los Angeles, things started well. They won the World Series in 1959, 1963 and 1965, behind the golden arms of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. But the team wasn’t yet part of the city’s fabric like they had been in Brooklyn.
At least part of that was because of resentment in L.A.’s prodigious Mexican-American community over the city’s use of eminent domain the Hispanic-heavy area of Chavez Ravine, the eventual home of the Dodgers.
That all changed in 1981.
The year of Fernandomania.
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Fernando Valenzuela, a pudgy-but-prolific pitcher from a small town in Mexico, burst onto the scene on Opening Day, recording a shutout — the first in a string of eight starts that have since become legend.
Mexican-Americans flocked to Dodger Stadium to see their new, unlikely hero who looked like him. He looked to the sky with every pitch. He threw a devastating screw ball. He helped L.A. win the World Series that year — and took home both the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards for his effort.
Valenzuela pitched 11 seasons for the Dodgers, starting in 1980, and ranks ninth on the franchise’s all-time win list. His rookie season in 1981 sparked the ‘Fernandomania’ phenomenon as he went 8-0 with five shutouts to start the season.
The Dodgers fanbase was changed forever. And the franchise has been woven into the city’s fabric ever since. That may not have happened without Valenzuela.
Valenzuela died on Oct. 22. Friday, the day of the parade, would have been his 64th birthday.
His jersey was a frequent sight along the parade route Friday morning.
“So many family members love him and I’ve seen his highlights,” said Johnny Leon, 22, of Pomona, wore a No. 34 jersey — Valenzuela’s number — to the celebration. “I wish he could be here to see this.”
Miguel Ramirez, 49, of Norwalk, highlighted the connection the icon helped foster between the city and the Dodgers.
“Fernando brought so many Hispanics to the game,” he said. I remember watching Fernando pitch against the As on ’88, so to be here today on his birthday is special. Dodgers is family.”
Valenzuela was also a part of the team, though not on the roster, seven years later when the Dodgers won what would be their last full-season championship — until this one.
The 1988 season was not supposed to belong to the Dodgers.
They were the underdogs from Brooklyn reborn again. The Mets, who the Dodgers beat in seven games in the National League Championship Series, had dominated them during the regular season. Valenzuela was nowhere near as dominant as he once was. In the World Series, they faced a juggernaut in the Oakland Athletics. And L.A.’s MVP, Kirk Gibson, had to bum legs.
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That all changed during Game 1 of the World Series: Gibson limped to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with the Dodgers down a run. There were two outs and one of the two greatest closers the game had ever seen — Dennis Eckersley — on the mound. But at least the tying run was aboard.
With a man on second after a stolen base, and the count full, Gibson hit a backdoor slider into the Los Angeles night. The legendary Vin Scully’s voice was the soundtrack for one of the greatest moments in Dodgers’ history:
“She is … gone!”
“In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”
The Dodgers finished off the A’s in five games. And Los Angeles celebrated with a parade.
And 36 years later, history repeated itself — with only a few flourishes.
The Dodgers are no longer the underdogs. They are the behemoths of Major League Baseball.
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They’ve won the National League West 11 out of the last 12 years. They regularly win 100-plus games a season. The 2024 World Series marked their fourth appearance in the Fall Classic in eight years. They sellout every game, have a mega television deal and are widely considered to be the best-run organization in baseball.
And they have stars aplenty: Betts and Freeman, Kershaw and Buehler. During previous seasons, they also had Corey Seager, who has two World Series MVPs to his name (one with the Dodgers) and future Hall of Fame pitcher Max Scherzer.
But despite of all those accolades — or maybe because of them — the last dozen years have seemed underwhelming.
In 2017, they lost the World Series to the Houston Astros in a thrilling seven games. But it later turned out the Astros had cheated. The devastating images of Kershaw after being rocked in Game 5 went from another tragic sorrow to an image of martyrdom — since the Astros hitters knew what pitches he would throw.
The title had been stolen from them, their ace had been denied the chance to cement his legacy.
The Dodgers lost in the World Series again the next year, this time to a superior Red Sox team that still had Betts. Hope for a title turned to despair once more.
Then came 2020. The season was only 60 games — but the Dodgers were still dominant. That strange, fan-less season ended with a championship: They beat the Tampa Bay Rays in six games.
But they did so in a neutral site in Texas.
And there was no tribute through the streets of Los Angeles.
The subsequent years were even harsher: They lost in the NLCS in 2021, and then in the Division Series in 2022 and ’23 — despite adding Freeman to the team. Those last two failures stung more because they came against divisional foes.
It was bleak after they lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks last year. Kershaw, their aging, weary ace, needed shoulder surgery. Buehler — a previous postseason beast — was recovering from his second Tommy John surgery. Betts and Freeman hadn’t performed in the last two postseasons.
But then came Ohtani, signing a $700 million contract — most of it deferred for a decade, to allow the Dodgers financial flexibility — to have a chance at postseason ball after six years of futility with the Angels. Yamamoto signed with L.A. too. As did fan favorite Teoscar Hernandez.
Hope sprang eternal.
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The 2024 season, though, was anything but a cakewalk. Ohtani had the first 50 home run, 50 stolen base season in history, sure. The Dodgers still won the division — and had the best record in MLB.
But they also lost pitcher after pitcher to injuries. Buehler looked like a shell of himself. Betts missed two months to an broken wrist.
The Padres frequently seemed the better team.
And shortly before the postseason began, Freeman severly sprained his right ankle.
But this team also found something they didn’t have in recent years: Grit. Fight. Perserverance.
And an underdog mentality that may not have been warranted given their payroll — but that connected them to the teams from 1088 and 1955.
They took down the Padres in five games in the NLDS. In the NLCS, they took down the Mets — just like in ’88 — in six games.
And that set a date with the Yankees, just like in 1955 and in Valenzuela’s rookie year.
Game one played out similarly to the first game in 1988: Down a run with two outs in the ninth inning, an injured hero stepped to the plate. But instead of Gibson, it was Freeman. Instead of one man on, the bases were loaded. And instead of a full count, Freeman blasted the first pitch into the right field stands.
But it was still the stuff of legend.
“She is gone,” announcer Joe Davis said, in a nod to his predecessor.
And so were the Yankees. The Dodgers won in five games — though it took a historic comeback in the final match.
The Dodgers came back from a 5-0 deficit on Wednesday in New York, eventually taking a 7-6 lead into the night. A weary bullpen, which had been Herculean all postseason, stepped aside in the ninth — to make way for Buehler.
He had been awful this season: Just one win and a 5.38 ERA. He may not have been on the roster had the Dodgers not had an epidemic of injuries to their starting staff.
But postseason Buehler is something else entirely. He mowed down the three Yankees hitters he faced — the last two via strikeouts, on devastating curve balls — and then stretched his arms wide, swaggering into an embrace from catcher Will Smith.
They had done it at last. Back in L.A., fireworks exploded. The celebration had begun on both coasts.
And from the visitors clubhouse at Yankee Stadium to the kinetic, crowded streets of Los Angeles, anticipation built:
The Dodgers and their city would finally get a parade. And the fabric holding the two together will be stronger than ever.
“The pride in it that we get from being a Dodger fan and being part of this big community,” Valerie Valencia said as she sat in a lawn chair in front of City Hall on Friday morning, “and we just all are here for the same reason and I think that’s what’s most exciting.”
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