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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the World Series didn't happen during the tense final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying escape feat after another and then prevailing in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that simultaneously challenged many negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a great athletic moment, possibly the decisive turn in the series in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," said the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers fan these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up regularly to matches and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats per game.

A Mixed Relationship with the Organization

After aggressive enforcement operations started in the city in early June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams quickly released messages of support with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the fact that a significant minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of current leaders. After significant external demands, the team later pledged $1m in aid for individuals directly affected by the operations but issued no official criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Past Heritage

Months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to mark their 2024 World Series victory at the White House – a move that sports writers described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", considering the team's boast in having been the pioneering major league franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and present and former athletes. A number of players such as the manager had voiced reluctance to go to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Conflicts

An additional issue for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, as per media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a private prison company that runs detention centers. The group's leadership has said repeatedly that it aims to stay out of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to current policies.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won championship victory and the ensuing explosion of team support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He couldn't ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the team the fortune it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous supporters who share similar misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of global stars, featuring the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the manager and his athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire don't get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, goes further than just the team's present 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 downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've acted around Hispanic fans while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the organization over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a evening restriction.

Global Stars and Fan Bonds

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a easy task, {