Clayton Kershaw officially hung up his glove after the Dodgers won the 2025 World Series. Somehow, that memo never reached the Oval Office invitation list, or at least not the person delivering remarks from behind the podium.
The Dodgers made their third White House visit in recent years on Thursday, celebrating back-to-back titles after beating the Blue Jays in a seven-game classic. Nearly the entire roster showed up, Kershaw included, even though his own playing career ended the moment he retired one batter to close out Game 3 of that series and called it a career.
Trump, scanning the crowd for someone to single out, landed on him anyway. “Legend Clayton Kershaw. Where is Clayton? I want to see him,” he said, then delivered the compliment. “He’s a winner. You talk about a winner, look at that guy!”
That much would have been a perfectly normal presidential exchange.
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That much would have been a perfectly normal presidential compliment. Then Trump kept talking. “I watched him beat a lot of our teams that were supposed to do well, they didn’t do well against him,” he continued, before adding the line that gave the whole thing away: “He’s still pitching well, I bet, right?”
Manager Dave Roberts stepped in to handle the correction as gently as anyone could.
“He’s spending time with the family now,” Roberts offered. Trump, recalibrating in real time, turned the whole thing into a follow-up question instead of just moving on. “You could pitch now, no? If they needed you, could you be out there?” he asked Kershaw directly. Kershaw didn’t dress it up. “No,” he said, and the Rose Garden crowd, including his own teammates, laughed.
Trump doesn’t realize that Clayton Kershaw is retired: “He’s still pitching well I bet, right?” pic.twitter.com/UNQpStJLYl
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2026
To be fair to Trump, Kershaw’s final season made the mix-up almost understandable.
The three-time Cy Young winner and 11-time All-Star faced exactly one batter in the entire 2025 World Series, a groundout in the Dodgers’ marathon 18-inning Game 3 win, and then walked away with his third championship ring after 18 years, every one of them in Dodger blue. He remains the franchise’s all-time strikeout leader and the last non-Ohtani pitcher to win an MVP award, back in 2014.
Kershaw has never been shy about how much these visits mean to him regardless of who’s behind the desk.
“The White House is an incredible honor to get to go see, regardless of who’s in office,” he said last year, after the team’s previous trip. “We went in 2021. We went this time. I know there’s been a lot of stuff about, should the Dodgers go? All this stuff. But at the end of the day, getting to go to the White House, getting to see the Oval Office, getting to meet the president of the United States, that’s stuff that you can’t lose sight of no matter what you believe.”
Trump had at least one other memorable line from the visit, referencing a wager with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney during the Dodgers’ rocky stretch of the series. “I was having a little bet with the Prime Minister of Canada… I was not feeling so good for a little while,” he said, a fair summary of a team that trailed 3-2 in the World Series and was down in Game 7 before pulling off the win.
President Trump joked that he had a bet with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on the Dodgers vs. Blue Jays World Series. 🤣
“I was having a little bet with the Prime Minister of Canada… I was not feeling so good for a little while.” pic.twitter.com/GktbbKmj65
— SleeperDodgers (@SleeperDodgers) July 23, 2026
Featured image via X screengrab
