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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying escape act after another and then winning in overtime over the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that simultaneously upended many negative misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The moment itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a remarkable athletic moment, 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, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"The players put forth this counter-narrative," said the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

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

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a team supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 spots per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When intensified immigration raids began in the city in June, and military units were deployed into the city to respond to resulting protests, two of the local soccer clubs promptly issued statements of support with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

Management has said the organization prefer to steer clear of political issues – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable portion of the supporters, even Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. After considerable external demands, the team subsequently committed $1m in aid for families personally impacted by the operations but made no official criticism of the government.

Official Visit and Past Heritage

Three months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their 2024 championship victory at the White House – a move that sports columnists labeled as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional team to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and current and past players. A number of team members such as the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the White House during the initial period but either reconsidered or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Conflicts

A further complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to media reports and its own published balance sheets, include a share in a detention company that runs enforcement centers. The group's executives has stated many times that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

All of that contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers support across the city.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his personal protest must have given the team the luck it needed to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous fans who have Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to support the team and its lineup of global stars, featuring the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on the following day, when the packed audience roared in support of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

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

Past Background and Community Effect

The issue, though, goes further than just the team's current owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the municipality razing three low-income Hispanic communities on a elevated area above downtown and then selling the land to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue revealing that the home he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, 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 following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They've acted around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the organization over its lack of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was under to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Fan Bonds

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