A walk-off home run from Freddie Freeman in the 18th inning, a miraculous pitching performance from Yoshinobu Yamamoto and a Miguel Rojas legacy game in the finale of the 2025 World Series brought the Commissioner’s Trophy to the Los Angeles Ravines for the second consecutive year.
Behind a payroll of nearly $350 million and more than 40 players on the roster, countless fans filled the 56,000 seats of Dodger Stadium. The fireworks went off immediately after the final out and crowds took to the streets of LA, with an incredible turnout for the trophy parade shortly after.
Being one of the 56,000 in the sea of blue for multiple games this season, it has been impossible to forget the memories of Dodgers baseball echoed through my family, friendships and schools growing up in LA County.
This experience isn’t unique to me, however. It’s common for most graduates of the LA Unified School District, most adults working full-time in Downtown and even for the staff who work at the 5Cs.
In an environment as diverse as the Claremont Colleges, where students come from all corners of the United States and beyond, keeping up with the Dodgers is no easy task. We are surrounded by students and fans from the Bay Area and New York, and rivalry banter dominates most of the dialogue about LA baseball.
In a search for a network of like-minded Dodgers fans, I found myself watching all 18 innings of Game 4 of the World Series at the Coop Fountain with Efren Zamora.
Zamora comes from Riverside, California, and is a PM cook at the Coop, serving 5C students with dining options through late evenings at Pomona College. As I sat directly in front of the TV for Game 4, I noticed Zamora peeking his head back and forth to check the score between orders. For him, that excitement has lingered for over 30 years.
“I started in the early ’90s,” Zamora said. “I’m gonna date myself around ’92 or ’93 — my older cousin — he was a big baseball fan, so watching him be a Dodgers fan, that’s how I became a Dodgers fan.”
He had just missed the Dodgers lifting the trophy in 1988, so the fandom was built purely on passion, not success. As an LA native, Zamora believes that the three World Series wins in the past five years made the Dodgers’ dynasty as one of the best teams to ever do it.
“These last two World Series [wins] just solidify that the Dodgers are the best team right now,” Zamora said. “It feels good being a Dodgers fan now, being at the age I am, where I can actually go to games whenever I want and see them live, and then just see them win … it feels good, man.”
While Zamora and I witnessed Freeman’s walk-off solo home run in the 18th inning from the Coop, his co-worker, Adrian Mila, had finished his shift hours earlier to attend the game in person.
Mila is from Pomona, California, and has worked as a stockworker at the Coop for the past four years. He is a sophomore at the University of La Verne and utilizes the Undergraduate Tuition Aid initiative for all full-time Pomona employees.
His love for the Dodgers dates back to a decade ago, when he and his dad went on a work trip.
“I’ve been a [Dodgers] fan since I was a kid when I went on a work trip with my dad,” Mila said. “We went to Dodger Stadium, so that’s when I became a fan … I got back into it in 2013 or 2014, so I started going to playoff games. I saw all the Kershaw implosions in the playoffs … I’ve seen a lot of unfortunate Dodgers losses.”
The 18-inning battle in LA this year was the second-longest World Series game in history, at six hours and 39 minutes, and ended at 11:50 p.m. This was not Mila’s first World Series game, however — he also witnessed Yamamoto’s win in Game 2 of the 2024 World Series, when the Dodgers defeated the Yankees to take a 2-0 lead. He was determined to experience the atmosphere live after Freeman’s walk-off grand slam in the 11th inning of Game 1.
“After I saw the Freeman walk-off on my TV at home, I was like, ‘I’m going to the second game no matter what.’ So I did,” Mila said. “Then I went to Game 3 this year and I saw Tyler Glasnow pitch. Didn’t have a good start, but the team backed him up in the end. It just took literally forever. I sat down with my food and never got up. I stood there for the rest of the game, then I went home and to work the next day.”
Perhaps Mila is a good-luck charm, as the Dodgers are undefeated in the World Series with him in attendance.
For many who were unable to experience the games live, students and staff enjoyed the World Series games on TV in the comfort of their dining halls like Hoch-Shanahan, McConnell and Frary. At Pitzer College, Miguel Menjivar, the General Manager of McConnell Dining Hall, is known around campus for broadcasting sports events throughout the week.
Menjivar was born in LA but was raised in Mexico until 1988, when he returned to his birthplace. Remarkably, the year of his return was when the Dodgers, led by the stardom of Fernando Valenzuela and Kirk Gibson, lifted the World Series trophy that October.
His first memories of the Dodgers were of the team’s immediate success, introduced to him by his LA-native grandmother. Despite the Dodgers waiting 32 years after 1988 for another World Series win, Menjivar has been a persistent fan through thick and thin.
“There was always something that [the Dodgers] did to keep you in it,” Menjivar said. “I never really got too down, other than 2017. That was the worst year, because I think that’s the best team we’ve had until this year. So that was frustrating, but there was always something to cheer about, always something to be happy about.”
Having spent his undergraduate years at San Francisco State University and worked with the San Francisco Giants as an on-field security guard at Oracle Park, Menjivar understands the role that sports can play in bringing people together.
McConnell, for example, hosts the Champions League table on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and often hosts primetime basketball and football whenever games are on. That experience not only brings 5C students to a table, but creates that extra layer of community that wouldn’t exist without Menjivar and McConnell’s TV.
“It’s great because you get to know people,” Menjivar said. “There are people who come in here who are big Dodgers fans, and they talk about the game. ’Did you see that? How could they do that?’ It just gives you a community something to talk about, you know? That’s why sports are so great, bringing people together … that’s what I love.”
Mila felt the same way about the Dodgers’ recent success, and more specifically, the role that the team has played in his life.
“Everybody likes to cheer for [sports], especially when they’re going through hard times, like Game 7 was nuts,” Mila said. “So I think sports are like a distraction in some way from the realities of life. Everybody goes through their own struggles. It gives people a rallying point through the good and the bad.”
In Claremont, that unity through sports is apparent. Sixth Street Rivalries pack the stands, dorms burst into exclamations during big playoff games and the Pomona Events Committee even subsidizes multiple sporting events annually. Zamora’s four years at Pomona have been defined by a strong sense of that community, bonded through sports.
“You see a lot of students with Dodgers’ jerseys or shirts, so I interact with them,” Zamora said. “That’s a cool thing about working with the Coop, that interaction I have with students, I still have students that graduated already last year, two years ago, that text me.”
Zamora, Mila and Menjivar all understand the positive impact that sports can have in creating a valuable community. Whether acknowledging Zamora’s Dodgers pin or engaging in friendly rivalry banter with Menjivar, two things are clear: sports make Claremont better and that excitement for Dodgers baseball is like no other.
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