🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense final game on Saturday, when her team executed one dramatic escape feat after another before prevailing in extra innings over the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, game-winning play that at the same time challenged numerous harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past years.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not merely a great sporting moment, possibly the decisive turn in the series in the team's favor after appearing for most of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after months of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"The players put forth this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

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

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter these days – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to matches and fill up as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Complicated Connection with the Organization

When aggressive immigration raids started in the city in early June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams promptly issued statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable minority of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of current leaders. Under considerable external demands, the organization later pledged $one million in aid for families directly impacted by the operations but issued no official criticism of the government.

Official Event and Historical Heritage

Three months before, the organization did not delay in accepting an offer to mark their previous championship win at the official residence – a decision that local writers labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent references of that history and the values it embodies by executives and present and former athletes. A number of players including the manager had expressed unwillingness to travel to the White House during the initial period but either reconsidered or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Business Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, as per media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a detention corporation that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to certain agendas.

These factors add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in particular – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area writer one observer agonized at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have given the squad the fortune it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many fans who have similar reservations seem to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's business overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

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

Historical Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, however, goes further than only the team's current proprietors. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill above downtown and then selling the property to the team for a small part of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Latino columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm 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 summer, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of response to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

International Stars and Community Bonds

Distinguishing the squad from its business leadership is not a simple matter, {