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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the World Series did not happen during the tense finale on Saturday, when her team executed one death-defying escape act after another before prevailing in extra innings over the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that simultaneously challenged numerous negative misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not just a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the team's direction after appearing for much of the series like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," said Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so easy to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who attend faithfully to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Complicated Connection with the Team

After aggressive immigration raids started in the city in early June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to respond to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer clubs quickly released messages of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable portion of the supporters, even Latinos, are followers of certain leaders. Under significant public pressure, the organization later pledged $one million in support for individuals personally impacted by the raids but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to mark their 2024 World Series win at the White House – a move that local writers labeled as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", considering the team's boast in having been the pioneering major league team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that history and the principles it embodies by officials and present and former athletes. Several players such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the White House during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Conflicts

An additional complication for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a detention corporation that runs enforcement centers. The group's leadership has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to certain agendas.

These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship victory and the following explosion of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have brought the team the fortune it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's business overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, though, goes further than just the organization's current owners. The deal that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the city razing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the team for a fraction of its market value. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the events has an impoverished worker at the venue stating that the home he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the summer, when demands to avoid the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were upended by the awkward fact that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Community Bonds

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