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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple dramatic escape feat after another before winning in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged numerous negative stereotypes promoted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive play. the second baseman, at second base, caught the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't just a great athletic moment, possibly the key shift in the series in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

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

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers fan these days – for her or for the many of other Latinos who attend regularly to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 spots per game.

A Mixed Relationship with the Organization

When intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in early June, and military units were deployed into the area to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's sports teams promptly released statements of support with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

The team president stated the organization want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. After considerable public pressure, the organization later pledged $1m in support for families personally affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the government.

Official Visit and Past Legacy

Months before, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous championship victory at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists described as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering major league team to end the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that history and the principles it embodies by officials and present and former athletes. Several team members such as the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Business Control and Fan Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a share in a detention company that runs detention centers. Guggenheim's executives has stated repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

These factors add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino fans in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the following explosion of team support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the team?" local columnist one observer reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the team the luck it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many supporters who share similar misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to back the players and its lineup of global stars, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in support of the coach and his athletes but jeered the executive and the top official of the investors.

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

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, though, goes further than only the organization's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the story has an low-income parking attendant at the venue revealing that the home he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most influential Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They've acted 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 warmer months, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when the city center was under to a evening restriction.

International Players and Community Connections

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {