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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple death-defying comeback act after another before prevailing in overtime against the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning sequence that simultaneously upended many harmful misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The moment itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, decisive play. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not merely a great sporting moment, possibly the decisive shift in momentum in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, troops patrolling the streets, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It's so easy to be disheartened these days."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a team supporter these days – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When intensified immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard units were sent into the area to react to resulting protests, two of the local sports teams promptly released messages of support with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the fact that a sizable minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of current leaders. After significant public pressure, the organization later pledged $one million in aid for families directly impacted by the raids but made no public criticism of the government.

White House Event and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in accepting an invitation to mark their previous World Series win at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the team's pride in having been the first professional team to end the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by officials and current and past players. A number of team members such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

A further issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own released balance sheets, include a share in a private prison company that runs detention centers. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

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

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local writer one observer reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He was unable to finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he believed his personal protest must have brought the squad the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous supporters who share similar misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to support the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Asian superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the coach and his athletes but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

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

Historical Background and Community Effect

The problem, though, goes further than just the team's current owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the city razing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the land to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the venue stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Latino columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They've 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 noted over the summer, when demands to avoid the organization over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a evening curfew.

Global Stars and Fan Bonds

Distinguishing the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple task, {