🔗 Share this article

For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off one death-defying comeback feat after another before prevailing in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended numerous negative stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to record another, game-winning play. the second baseman, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a remarkable athletic achievement, possibly the decisive shift in the series in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," explained the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

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

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend regularly to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 spots per game.

The Mixed Connection with the Team

After intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in early June, and military units were sent into the city to respond to ensuing protests, two of the city's sports teams promptly released messages of support with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization want to stay away of politics – a stance colored, possibly, by the reality that a significant minority of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current leaders. After significant public pressure, the team subsequently committed $1m in aid for families directly affected by the raids but issued no official condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Past Heritage

Months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an offer to mark their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a decision that local columnists described as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the first professional team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that history and the values it represents by officials and current and former athletes. Several players such as the coach had expressed reluctance to travel to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further complication for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a private prison corporation that runs detention centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to current policies.

All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Latino supporters in especial – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought World Series victory and the following outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" local writer one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the squad the fortune it required to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who share Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his athletes but jeered the team president and the top official of the ownership group.

"The executives in suits do not get to claim our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Community Impact

The issue, however, goes further than just the team's present proprietors. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill above the city center and then transferring the land to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 record that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the venue stating that the house he lost to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when calls to avoid the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a nightly restriction.

Global Stars and Fan Connections

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