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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad pulled off one death-defying comeback feat after another and then prevailing in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged many harmful stereotypes promoted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This was not merely a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in the series in the team's direction after looking for most of the series like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after months of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the streets, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "The world saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so easy to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

A Mixed Relationship with the Organization

When intensified immigration raids started in the city in early June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer clubs promptly released messages of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a view influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable portion of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. After significant external demands, the organization later pledged $one million in aid for individuals directly impacted by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the government.

White House Event and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their 2024 championship victory at the White House – a move that sports writers labeled as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", considering the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional team to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it represents by executives and present and former players. Several team members including the manager had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but then changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a share in a detention company that operates detention centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said many times that it aims to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain policies.

These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won championship triumph and the following explosion of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" local writer one observer agonized 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 cared strongly, to the extent that he decided his one-man protest must have brought the team the luck it required to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Many fans who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to back the team and its roster of global stars, including the Japanese megastar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience roared in support of the manager and his players but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire don't get to claim our players from us," the fan said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, though, runs deeper than only the team's current proprietors. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area above downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 album that documents the story has an low-income worker at the venue revealing that the home he lost to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and media personality, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the summer, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a nightly restriction.

International Players and Community Bonds

Distinguishing the squad from its business leadership is not a simple task, {