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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad executed one dramatic comeback feat after another before winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, decisive play that simultaneously upended many negative misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment in itself was stunning: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a great sporting achievement, possibly the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for most of the series like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after months of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of criticism from national leaders.

"The players put forth this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so easy to be disheartened right now."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats per game.

A Mixed Relationship with the Team

After aggressive enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard units were sent into the area to respond to ensuing protests, two of the local sports teams promptly released statements of support with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

The team president stated the organization want to steer clear of political issues – a stance influenced, possibly, by the reality that a sizable portion of the fans, even Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. After significant public pressure, the team later committed $one million in aid for individuals directly impacted by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the government.

White House Visit and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an invitation to celebrate their 2024 championship victory at the official residence – a move that sports writers described as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional team to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it represents by executives and current and past athletes. Several team members including the manager had expressed unwillingness to travel to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for fans is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released balance sheets, involve a stake in a detention company that operates detention facilities. The group's leadership has stated many times that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to current policies.

These factors add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won World Series victory and the following explosion of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the team the fortune it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous fans who have similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to back the team and its roster of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience roared in approval of the manager and his players but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

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

Past Context and Community Impact

The issue, though, runs deeper than only the organization's present owners. The deal that moved the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three low-income Latino communities on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the land to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s album that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the venue stating that the home he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its audience. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the team over its absence of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a nightly curfew.

Global Players and Fan Connections

Distinguishing the team from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {