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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying escape feat after another before winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The play itself was stunning: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after looking for most of the series like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for the city after a period of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so easy to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 spots per game.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids started in the city in June, and military units were sent into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local sports clubs promptly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

Management stated the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the fact that a sizable minority of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. After significant external demands, the team subsequently committed $one million in aid for individuals directly affected by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the administration.

Official Visit and Past Heritage

Months before, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to mark their previous World Series victory at the White House – a decision that sports writers described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and present and former players. Several team members such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the initial period but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

An additional complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a detention company that operates enforcement centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to certain policies.

These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the following explosion of team pride across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local writer one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he decided his one-man boycott must have given the squad the fortune it needed to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Management

Numerous fans who share Galindo's reservations appear to have decided that they can keep to back the team and its roster of international players, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on the following day, when the packed audience roared in approval of the manager and his athletes but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire don't get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Context and Community Effect

The issue, though, goes further than only the organization's present owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the municipality demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the venue revealing that the house he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the team and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the organization over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward reality that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a evening restriction.

International Players and Community Connections

Separating the squad from its business leadership is not a easy task, {