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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad executed one death-defying escape act after another before winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning play that at the same time challenged numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for much of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said the professor. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a different kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."

However, it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots each time.

The Mixed Connection with the Team

After aggressive enforcement operations started in the city in early June, and military troops were sent into the area to react to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer teams quickly issued statements of support with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a stance influenced, possibly, by the fact that a significant minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain political figures. Under significant public pressure, the team subsequently committed $1m in support for families directly impacted by the raids but issued no official condemnation of the government.

White House Visit and Historical Heritage

Months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to celebrate their 2024 World Series win at the White House – a decision that sports writers labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the first major league team to end the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and current and past players. A number of players including the coach had voiced unwillingness to go to the White House during the first term but either reconsidered or gave in to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

A further issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own published financial documents, involve a stake in a detention corporation that runs enforcement centers. Guggenheim's executives has stated repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to certain policies.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". He was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have brought the squad the luck it needed to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Many fans who share Galindo's reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to support the team and its roster of global stars, including the Asian superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the coach and his athletes but booed the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire don't get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Past Context and Community Effect

The problem, though, runs deeper than only the team's current proprietors. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then transferring the property to the team for a small part of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue revealing that the home he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most influential Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They have acted around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the summer, when calls to avoid the team over its absence of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward fact that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly curfew.

Global Stars and Fan Bonds

Separating the squad from its business leadership is not a easy task, {