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For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple dramatic comeback feat after another and then winning in overtime against the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that simultaneously upended numerous negative misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, decisive play. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a great athletic moment, possibly the decisive shift in the series in the team's direction after appearing for much of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, troops patrolling the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"The players put forth this counter-narrative," said the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They're 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."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who show up faithfully to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

When intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer teams promptly issued messages of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.

Management stated the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a view influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable minority of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. Under significant public pressure, the organization later committed $1m in aid for individuals directly impacted by the raids but issued no official criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their 2024 World Series win at the White House – a decision that sports writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional team to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and present and former athletes. A number of team members including the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional complication for supporters is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, as per media reports and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison company that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has said many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to certain agendas.

These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino supporters in particular – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought championship victory and the following outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" local columnist one observer reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant article pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our minds". He couldn't finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he believed his personal protest must have given the team the fortune it needed to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Management

Many supporters who have similar misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its roster of international players, including the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's business overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the manager and his athletes 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," the fan said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Historical Background and Community Effect

The problem, however, goes further than just the team's current proprietors. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then transferring the land to the team for a fraction of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue stating that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They have acted around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the summer, when calls to boycott the team over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the awkward fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Community Connections

Distinguishing the squad from its business leadership is not a simple task, {