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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her team executed multiple dramatic escape feat after another before prevailing in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended many harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from left field to snag a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't just a remarkable athletic moment, possibly the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for much of the series like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, 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 chased down. It is so easy to be demoralized these days."

However, it's exactly simple to be a team supporter these days – for her or for the many of other fans who show up regularly to matches and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

A Complicated Relationship with the Organization

When intensified enforcement operations began in the city in early June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly released messages of support with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a view influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable portion of the supporters, including Latinos, are followers of certain 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 government.

Official Event and Historical Legacy

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to mark their previous World Series victory at the White House – a decision that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", given the team's boast in having been the first major league team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that history and the principles it embodies by executives and present and past players. A number of players including the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the event during the initial period but either reconsidered or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional issue for fans is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement centers. Guggenheim's leadership has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain policies.

All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-won championship triumph and the following outpouring of team support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he decided his personal protest must have brought the squad the luck it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous supporters who share similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can continue to support the team and its roster of international stars, including the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate leadership. 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 manager and his athletes but jeered the executive and the top official of the investors.

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

Historical Background and Community Impact

The issue, though, runs deeper than only the team's current owners. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the city razing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area above the city center and then selling the property to the organization for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the venue revealing that the house he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for years.

"They have acted around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the team over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Community Connections

Distinguishing the team from its corporate owners is not a easy matter, {