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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying comeback feat after another before prevailing in extra innings against the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning play that at the same time upended numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't just a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps the key turn in the series in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so simple to be demoralized these days."

However, it's entirely simple to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 seats each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Organization

When intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were sent into the area to react to resulting protests, two of the local sports teams quickly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

Management stated the Dodgers prefer to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the team later committed $1m in aid for families personally affected by the operations but made no official condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Legacy

Months earlier, the team did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their 2024 World Series win at the White House – a move that sports writers described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", considering the team's pride in having been the pioneering major league franchise to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that history and the values it embodies by officials and current and past players. Several team members such as the manager had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but then changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Control and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to current agendas.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Is it okay to support the team?" local columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". He couldn't ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have brought the squad the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Players from the Management

Many fans who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to support the team and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

"These men 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 Community Effect

The issue, though, runs deeper than just the organization's current owners. The deal that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the municipality demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill above downtown and then transferring the property to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the house he lost to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most influential Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer noted over the warmer months, when demands to avoid the team over its lack of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Community Bonds

Separating the team from its corporate owners is not a easy task, {