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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic escape feat after another and then winning in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, game-winning sequence that simultaneously challenged numerous negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a great athletic moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for most of the games like the weaker team. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos showing an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."

However, it's entirely simple to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 spots per game.

The Complicated Connection with the Organization

When intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, and national guard troops were deployed into the area to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports teams promptly released messages of support with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, possibly, by the reality that a significant portion of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of current leaders. Under considerable external demands, the team later pledged $one million in support for families personally affected by the raids but issued no public condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Heritage

Months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an offer to celebrate their previous championship win at the official residence – a decision that sports writers described as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", considering the team's boast in having been the first major league team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and current and past athletes. A number of team members such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or gave in to pressure from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own released financial documents, include a stake in a detention company that runs enforcement centers. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to current agendas.

These factors contribute to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought championship victory and the following outpouring of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his personal boycott must have given the squad the fortune it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who have similar reservations seem to have decided that they can keep to back the players and its lineup of international players, including the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the top official of the investors.

"These men in formal attire do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, though, goes further than just the team's current proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the city razing three working-class Hispanic communities on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the venue revealing that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for years.

"They have acted around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to avoid the team over its absence of response to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Stars and Community Bonds

Distinguishing the squad from its business leadership is not a easy matter, {