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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off one death-defying comeback feat after another and then winning in overtime against the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that at the same time upended numerous harmful stereotypes promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great sporting moment, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the team's favor after appearing for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the streets, and a constant stream of criticism from official sources.

"The players put forth this alternative story," said the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and chased down. It's so simple to be demoralized right now."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for her or for the many of other Latinos who show up regularly to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

When aggressive enforcement operations started in the city in early June, and military units were sent into the city to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams promptly released messages of solidarity with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the organization want to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the fact that a significant minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of current political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the organization subsequently pledged $one million in support for families personally affected by the operations but made no public criticism of the administration.

White House Event and Past Legacy

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their previous World Series win at the official residence – a move that sports writers described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and present and former players. A number of team members including the coach had voiced reluctance to travel to the White House during the initial period but then changed their minds or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to media reports and its own published financial documents, involve a stake in a private prison company that operates enforcement facilities. The group's leadership has stated many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won championship victory and the following outpouring of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to support the team?" local columnist one observer agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his personal protest must have brought the team the fortune it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Many supporters who share Galindo's misgivings seem to have concluded that they can continue to back the team and its lineup of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in suits do not get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, though, runs deeper than only the team's current proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the municipality demolishing three low-income Latino communities on a elevated area above the city center and then transferring the land to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the house he lost to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most widely followed Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when calls to boycott the organization over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward reality that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was under to a nightly restriction.

International Stars and Community Connections

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {