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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the nail-biting finale last Saturday, when her team executed one death-defying comeback act after another and then winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, decisive play that at the same time challenged many harmful stereotypes promoted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a great athletic achievement, possibly the decisive shift in the series in the Dodgers' direction after looking for most of the games like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for the community and for Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos showing an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so easy to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend regularly to home games and occupy as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

A Complicated Connection with the Team

After aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard units were sent into the area to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs quickly issued statements of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

Management stated the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant portion of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of certain leaders. Under considerable external demands, the organization later pledged $one million in support for families directly impacted by the raids but made no public criticism of the government.

Official Visit and Historical Heritage

Three months before, the team did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a decision that sports writers described as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and present and past athletes. A number of players such as the manager had expressed reluctance to travel to the White House during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison company that operates enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series victory and the following explosion of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to support the team?" area writer Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our minds". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the squad the fortune it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many supporters who have Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can keep to back the players and its lineup of international stars, featuring the Asian superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's business overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience roared in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the investors.

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

Historical Context and Community Effect

The problem, though, goes further than just the organization's present owners. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Latino communities on a hill above the city center and then selling the property to the team for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that documents the events has an low-income parking attendant at the venue stating that the home he lost to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most widely followed Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer noted over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the organization over its lack of response to the raids were upended by the awkward reality that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly restriction.

International Stars and Fan Bonds

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