🔗 Share this article

For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple dramatic comeback feat after another and then prevailing in overtime over the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning sequence that simultaneously challenged many negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

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

This wasn't merely a great athletic moment, possibly the decisive shift in the series in the team's direction after appearing for much of the games like the weaker team. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and chased down. It's so simple to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a team supporter these days – for her or for the many of other Latinos who attend faithfully to home games and occupy as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats per game.

A Complicated Relationship with the Organization

After aggressive enforcement operations started in the city in early June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the city's sports teams quickly released statements of support with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

Management stated the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a view influenced, possibly, by the reality that a significant minority of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. Under significant external demands, the team subsequently pledged $1m in support for families personally impacted by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the government.

Official Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous World Series win at the official residence – a move that local writers labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering major league franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent references of that legacy and the values it represents by executives and current and former athletes. Several players such as the manager had expressed reluctance to travel to the event during the initial period but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a private prison corporation that runs detention centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said many times that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

These factors contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in particular – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won championship victory and the following explosion of team support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". He was unable to finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he decided his one-man protest must have given the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Many supporters who have Galindo's reservations seem to have concluded that they can keep to back the players and its lineup of global stars, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his athletes but booed the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in suits don't get to claim our players from us," the fan said. "We've been with the team longer than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, however, runs deeper than only the organization's current owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then selling the land to the team for a small part of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that documents the events has an low-income worker at the venue stating that the home he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly southern California most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the warmer months, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of response to the raids were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Fan Bonds

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