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For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying escape act after another before prevailing in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened a game earlier, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, game-winning sequence that simultaneously challenged numerous harmful stereotypes touted about Latinos in recent years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not merely a remarkable athletic achievement, possibly the key shift in momentum in the team's favor after looking for much of the series like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after months of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"The players put forth this alternative story," explained the professor. "The world saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having 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 detained and pursued. It is so simple to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Complicated Connection with the Team

After intensified immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and military troops were sent into the city to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local sports clubs quickly issued statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president stated the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a stance colored, possibly, by the fact that a sizable portion of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. After significant external demands, the organization subsequently committed $one million in aid for families directly impacted by the operations but issued no official criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Months before, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to mark their previous World Series win at the White House – a move that local columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", considering the team's boast in having been the first professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and current and past players. A number of team members such as the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the initial period but either changed their minds or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to sources and its own released financial documents, involve a share in a detention corporation that operates detention facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to current agendas.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought World Series victory and the following outpouring of team pride across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". He was unable to finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have brought the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Management

Many fans who share Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to back the team and its lineup of global stars, featuring the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the manager and his athletes but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our boys in blue 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, goes further than only the team's present owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the municipality demolishing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area above downtown and then selling the property to the team for a small part of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that documents the story has an impoverished worker at the stadium stating that the home he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic dynamic between the team and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've acted around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to boycott the team over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward reality that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Fan Bonds

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