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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the World Series didn't occur during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple death-defying escape feat after another before prevailing in extra innings over the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time upended many negative stereotypes promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández charged in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This was not just a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in the series in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for much of the series like the underdog team. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being key figures on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so simple to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers fan these days – for her or for the many of other fans who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Mixed Relationship with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were sent into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the local soccer clubs promptly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

Management has said the organization prefer to steer clear of political issues – a view influenced, possibly, by the fact that a significant minority of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of current leaders. After significant public pressure, the organization subsequently committed $1m in aid for families directly affected by the operations but made no public criticism of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Heritage

Months before, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to celebrate their 2024 championship victory at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists described as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional team to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and present and former athletes. A number of team members such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the initial period but either reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Business Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own published financial documents, involve a stake in a private prison company that runs detention facilities. The group's leadership has said many times that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

These factors add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic fans in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won World Series victory and the following explosion of team pride across the city.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he believed his personal boycott must have given the squad the luck it required to win.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Numerous fans who share similar misgivings appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its roster of international stars, featuring the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the manager and his athletes but booed the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

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

Historical Background and Community Effect

The issue, though, goes further than only the organization's current proprietors. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Hispanic communities on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the property to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers 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 organization over its absence of response to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

International Stars and Fan Connections

Separating the team from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {