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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad executed one dramatic escape feat after another and then winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended many negative stereotypes touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The play in itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball moments before a runner collided with him, sending him backwards.

This was not just a great athletic achievement, possibly the decisive turn in the series in the team's direction after appearing for much of the games like the underdog side. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan these days – for her or for the many of other Latinos who attend regularly to home games and occupy as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

The Mixed Connection with the Team

After aggressive enforcement operations began in the city in early June, and national guard units were sent into the area to react to ensuing protests, two of the city's soccer teams quickly released statements of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant minority of the fans, including Latinos, are followers of current political figures. After considerable public pressure, the team later pledged $one million in aid for families directly affected by the operations but issued no official criticism of the administration.

Official Visit and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an invitation to mark their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a move that local writers described as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that history and the values it represents by executives and current and former players. Several players such as the manager 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 issue for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison company that runs detention centers. The group's leadership has stated many times that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to current agendas.

These factors contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won championship victory and the following outpouring of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an elegant article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he believed his personal boycott must have brought the squad the fortune it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Many supporters who have Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to support the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's business overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

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

Historical Context and Community Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than just the organization's present owners. The agreement that brought the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s involved the city razing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area above the city center and then transferring the land to the team for a small part of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, perhaps southern California most influential Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for years.

"They have acted around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer noted over the warmer months, when calls to avoid the team over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Community Connections

Distinguishing the team from its corporate owners is not a easy matter, {