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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship did not happen during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying comeback act after another and then winning in extra innings against the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended many negative misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent decades.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from left field to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning play. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a great sporting achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for most of the series like the weaker side. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, 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 negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

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

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who attend regularly to matches and fill up as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 spots per game.

A Complicated Relationship with the Team

When aggressive enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in early June, and military troops were deployed into the area to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams promptly issued statements of support with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization want to steer clear of politics – a stance influenced, possibly, by the reality that a significant minority of the supporters, even Latinos, are followers of certain leaders. After significant public pressure, the organization later committed $one million in support for families directly affected by the raids but issued no official condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to mark their previous championship win at the official residence – a move that sports columnists labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the first professional franchise to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that history and the values it embodies by officials and present and former players. Several players such as the coach had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison corporation that operates detention centers. The group's leadership has said repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to certain agendas.

These factors contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Latino fans in especial – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our minds". He was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his one-man protest must have given the team the fortune it required to win.

Separating the Players from the Management

Many supporters who have Galindo's misgivings appear to have concluded that they can keep to support the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Asian superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the manager and his players but jeered the team president and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in suits do not get to claim our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Background and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, however, goes further than only the team's present owners. The deal that moved the former franchise to the city in the 1950s involved the city razing three low-income Latino communities on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the events has an low-income parking attendant at the venue stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most influential Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters 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 avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a evening restriction.

Global Players and Fan Bonds

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