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For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her team executed one dramatic comeback act after another and then prevailing in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that simultaneously upended numerous harmful stereotypes promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a runner collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This was not merely a great athletic achievement, possibly the decisive shift in momentum in the team's favor after looking for much of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"The players put forth this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so easy to be demoralized right now."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in early June, and military troops were deployed into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local soccer clubs promptly issued statements of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a significant portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. After considerable external demands, the team subsequently pledged $one million in support for families directly affected by the raids but issued no official condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their previous World Series victory at the White House – a move that sports columnists described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional franchise to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular references of that history and the principles it represents by executives and present and former athletes. A number of team members such as the coach had voiced unwillingness to go to the White House during the first term but then changed their minds or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Business Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional complication for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released financial documents, involve a share in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's executives has stated repeatedly that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won championship victory and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to root for the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he believed his personal boycott must have brought the squad the fortune it needed to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Management

Numerous fans who share Galindo's reservations appear to have decided that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of international players, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience roared in support of the coach and his athletes but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives 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 Effect

The issue, though, runs deeper than only the organization's present owners. The agreement that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 record that documents the story has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They have acted around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the organization over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

Global Players and Fan Connections

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