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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her team executed one dramatic escape act after another before winning in overtime over the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, game-winning play that at the same time challenged many harmful misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from left field to snag a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't just a remarkable athletic moment, perhaps the decisive shift in the series in the team's favor after looking for much of the series like the weaker team. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"The players put forth this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so simple to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Organization

When intensified immigration raids began in the city in early June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams quickly released statements of solidarity with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the reality that a significant portion of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. Under considerable external demands, the organization later committed $1m in support for individuals personally impacted by the raids but issued 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 White House – a decision that sports columnists labeled as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the principles it represents by executives and present and former athletes. A number of players such as the coach had voiced unwillingness to travel to the White House during the initial period but either reconsidered or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Conflicts

An additional complication for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to media reports and its own published balance sheets, involve a stake in a private prison company that runs enforcement facilities. The group's leadership has stated repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to certain agendas.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won championship triumph and the ensuing explosion of team pride across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have given the team the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Management

Many fans who share Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of international players, featuring the Asian superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, though, runs deeper than just the organization's present owners. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then selling the property to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 record that chronicles the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've acted around Latino followers while picking their pockets 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 lack of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Stars and Fan Bonds

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {