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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her team executed multiple dramatic comeback act after another and then winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning play that at the same time upended numerous negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The play itself was stunning: the outfielder charged in from left field to snag a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This was not merely a great sporting moment, possibly the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for much of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after months of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so simple to be demoralized right now."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who attend regularly to matches and fill up as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

After intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in early June, and military units were deployed into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the city's sports teams quickly released messages of solidarity with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a view influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable minority of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain leaders. After significant external demands, the team subsequently committed $one million in support for individuals personally impacted by the operations but issued no public criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Heritage

Three months before, the team did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series win at the White House – a decision that sports columnists labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering major league team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and current and past athletes. Several players including the manager had expressed reluctance to travel to the White House during the first term but then changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a stake in a private prison corporation that operates detention centers. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain agendas.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic fans in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought championship victory and the following outpouring of team pride across the city.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have given the team the luck it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Numerous fans who have Galindo's misgivings appear to have concluded that they can keep to back the players and its lineup of international stars, including the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the manager and his athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

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

Past Context and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, though, goes further than only the team's present proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic communities on a hill overlooking the city center and then selling the land to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s record that documents the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most widely followed Latino writer and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They've acted around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to avoid the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Fan Connections

Separating the team from its business leadership is not a simple task, {