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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic escape feat after another before winning in extra innings against the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning play that simultaneously upended many harmful misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The moment in itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a remarkable athletic moment, perhaps the decisive shift in the series in the Dodgers' favor after looking for most of the series like the weaker team. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after months of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so simple to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a team fan these days – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats each time.

The Complicated Connection with the Team

After intensified immigration raids started in the city in June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams promptly released messages of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

Management stated the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable minority of the fans, even Latinos, are followers of certain leaders. Under significant external demands, the organization subsequently pledged $one million in aid for individuals directly affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the administration.

Official Visit and Past Legacy

Months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous championship win at the official residence – a move that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering major league franchise to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and present and former players. A number of team members including the coach had voiced reluctance to travel to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Supporter Conflicts

An additional complication for fans is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison company that runs detention centers. The group's leadership has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his one-man protest must have given the team the fortune it needed to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many supporters who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to support the team and its roster of international stars, featuring the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's business overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the manager and his players but booed the executive and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in suits do not get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, runs deeper than just the team's current owners. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three working-class Hispanic communities on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the land to the team for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 record that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly southern California most widely followed Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They've acted around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the team over its absence of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was under to a nightly restriction.

International Players and Community Connections

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