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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple dramatic escape act after another before winning in extra innings over the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged many negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The play itself was stunning: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, decisive out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a remarkable sporting moment, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after looking for much of the series like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so easy to be disheartened right now."

However, it's exactly simple to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend regularly to matches and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Mixed Relationship with the Team

When aggressive enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were deployed into the area to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly released statements of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable portion of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the organization later pledged $one million in support for families personally impacted by the operations but issued no official criticism of the administration.

White House Event and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the White House – a move that sports writers labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering major league team to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and present and past athletes. A number of team members including the manager had voiced reluctance to travel to the event during the initial period but either reconsidered or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a detention corporation that runs detention centers. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to current policies.

All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought World Series triumph and the following explosion of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our minds". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he believed his personal protest must have given the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many supporters who share Galindo's reservations seem to have concluded that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of global players, including the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience roared in approval of the manager and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

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

Historical Background and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, though, runs deeper than just the team's current proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic communities on a hill overlooking the city center and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A track on a 2005 record that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the venue revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They've acted around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was under to a evening restriction.

Global Players and Fan Bonds

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