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Dodgers' Gonzalez avoided Trump hotel on May trip to Chicago

Richard Mackson / USA TODAY Sports

The Los Angeles Dodgers didn't stay there this weekend, but when the club checked into the Trump International Hotel and Tower during a May road trip through Chicago, one player decided to stay elsewhere: Adrian Gonzalez.

"I didn't stay there," Gonzalez told J.P. Hoornstra of the Orange County Register. "I had my reasons."

Gonzalez, a proud Mexican-American who has represented Mexico three times in the World Baseball Classic, wouldn't divulge his reasons - "We're here to play baseball, not talk politics," he said - but, per Hoornstra, the obvious inference is a contempt for the hotel's owner: Republication presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Throughout his wild, increasingly controversial campaign, Trump has repeatedly directed invective towards Mexicans, painting them as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists while famously pledging to "build a wall" on the Mexico-U.S. border to halt illegal immigration. According to data published Friday by the Pew Research Center, almost two-thirds of millennial Latinos poised to vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton say their support is more a vote against Trump than for Clinton.

This past weekend, with the Dodgers back in Chicago for the first two games of the National League Championship Series, the club didn't stay at the Trump hotel, as the hotel required a non-refundable deposit in order to hold a block of rooms for the team.

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