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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense final game last Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another and then prevailing in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time upended many harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The play itself was stunning: the outfielder charged in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a great sporting achievement, possibly the decisive shift in momentum in the team's direction after looking for most of the games like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," said Molina. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so simple to be demoralized right now."

However, it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan these days – for her or for the many of other Latinos who show up regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Organization

After intensified enforcement operations began in the city in June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local soccer clubs promptly issued statements of solidarity with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

The team president stated the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current leaders. Under significant public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $one million in aid for families personally impacted by the raids but issued no official criticism of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Months before, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their previous championship victory at the White House – a decision that sports writers described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that history and the principles it represents by officials and present and former players. Several players such as the manager had expressed unwillingness to travel to the White House during the initial period but either reconsidered or succumbed to demands from team management.

Business Control and Fan Conflicts

A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a stake in a detention corporation that operates enforcement centers. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to current agendas.

All of that add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino fans in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he believed his personal boycott must have given the team the fortune it required to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Many supporters who have Galindo's reservations appear to have decided that they can continue to support the team and its lineup of international stars, including the Asian megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

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

Past Background and Community Effect

The issue, however, goes further than just the team's present owners. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the city razing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the venue revealing that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening restriction.

International Players and Community Connections

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a simple matter, {