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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 nail-biting finale last Saturday, when her squad executed multiple death-defying comeback act after another and then prevailing in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that at the same time upended numerous harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to record another, decisive play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This was not just a great athletic achievement, possibly the decisive shift in the series in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for most of the series like the underdog side. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "The world saw Latinos showing an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so easy to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand spots each time.

The Mixed Connection with the Organization

After aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard units were sent into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer clubs quickly released statements of support with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

Management has said the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, possibly, by the reality that a sizable minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. After significant public pressure, the organization later pledged $1m in support for families directly affected by the raids but made no official criticism of the administration.

Official Visit and Historical Heritage

Months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous World Series victory at the White House – a move that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the first major league team to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it embodies by executives and present and former athletes. A number of team members including the coach had voiced reluctance to travel to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

An additional issue for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own published financial documents, involve a stake in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement facilities. The group's leadership has stated repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to certain agendas.

These factors contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic fans in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of team support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He couldn't ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he believed his one-man protest must have brought the team the luck it needed to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many fans who share Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can keep to support the players and its roster of global players, including the Japanese megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the coach and his athletes but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

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

Past Context and Community Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than just the team's current owners. The agreement that moved the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s required the municipality demolishing three low-income Hispanic communities on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the events has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the home he forfeited to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, perhaps southern California most widely followed Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, problematic dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Latino fans 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 organization over its absence of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward reality that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a evening restriction.

Global Players and Community Connections

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