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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the nail-biting finale last Saturday, when her team executed multiple death-defying comeback feat after another and then winning in overtime against the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, decisive sequence that simultaneously challenged numerous harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The play in itself was stunning: Hernández 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, game-winning out. the second baseman, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This was not merely a remarkable sporting moment, possibly the key shift in the series in the Dodgers' favor after looking for most of the series like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after months of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting 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 – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so easy to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand seats per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When aggressive enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in early June, and military troops were sent into the area to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly issued statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

Management has said the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable portion of the supporters, even Latinos, are supporters of certain political figures. Under significant public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in aid for families directly affected by the raids but made no public criticism of the administration.

White House Event and Historical Legacy

Months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an offer to celebrate their previous championship win at the official residence – a move that local columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular references of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and current and past players. A number of team members including the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Fan Conflicts

A further issue for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own published balance sheets, include a share in a private prison company that runs enforcement centers. Guggenheim's executives has stated repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

These factors add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won championship victory and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to support the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have brought the team the fortune it required to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who share similar reservations seem to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's business overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the coach and his athletes but booed the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in suits do not get to take our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We've been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, though, goes further than just the organization's present owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the municipality razing three low-income Hispanic communities on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then selling the land to the organization for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 album that documents the events has an low-income worker at the venue stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer noted over the warmer months, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

Global Players and Community Connections

Separating the team from its business leadership is not a easy matter, {