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For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the World Series did not happen during the nail-biting finale last Saturday, when her team pulled off one dramatic escape act after another and then winning in extra innings over the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, game-winning sequence that simultaneously upended many harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent decades.

The play in itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not merely a great athletic moment, perhaps the key shift in the series in the team's direction after looking for most of the series like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for the city after months of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being key figures on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It's so easy to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to matches and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Complicated Connection with the Team

When intensified enforcement operations began in the city in June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

Management stated the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the fact that a significant minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current leaders. After considerable public pressure, the team subsequently committed $one million in aid for families directly impacted by the raids but issued no official criticism of the administration.

White House Event and Past Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their 2024 championship victory at the White House – a move that sports writers described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league team to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the values it represents by officials and current and former players. Several players such as the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but either changed their minds or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a detention company that operates detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to certain policies.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won championship victory and the ensuing outpouring of team pride across the city.

"Is it okay to support the team?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our minds". He couldn't ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he believed his one-man protest must have given the team the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Many fans who have similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can continue to back the team and its roster of international stars, including the Asian superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's business overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"These men in suits don't get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Historical Background and Community Impact

The problem, though, runs deeper than only the organization's current owners. The agreement that moved the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then transferring the land to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer noted over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was under to a evening restriction.

International Stars and Community Connections

Separating the team from its corporate owners is not a easy matter, {