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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off one 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 athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, decisive play that at the same time upended numerous negative stereotypes promoted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, decisive play. the second baseman, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a remarkable athletic moment, possibly the decisive shift in the series in the team's favor after looking for much of the series like the weaker side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," 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 confidence. They are energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

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

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 seats each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Organization

When aggressive enforcement operations began in the city in June, and military troops were sent into the area to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly issued messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

Management has said the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable portion of the supporters, including Latinos, are followers of current political figures. Under significant public pressure, the team subsequently committed $one million in support for individuals personally impacted by the raids but made no public criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Legacy

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their 2024 World Series win at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists described as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first major league franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by officials and present and past athletes. Several team members including the manager had expressed unwillingness to go to the event during the first term but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional issue for fans is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released financial documents, involve a share in a private prison company that runs enforcement facilities. The group's executives has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to certain agendas.

These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the squad the luck it needed to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous fans who share Galindo's misgivings seem to have concluded that they can continue to support the players and its roster of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the manager and his athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in suits don't get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We've been with the team longer than they have."

Historical Background and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, though, goes further than only the team's present owners. The agreement that brought the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three low-income Latino communities on a hill overlooking the city center and then selling the property to the team for a fraction of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s album that documents the events has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to avoid the organization over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Stars and Fan Connections

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