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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense finale last Saturday, when her team executed multiple dramatic comeback feat after another before prevailing in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended many harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great sporting moment, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of criticism from national leaders.

"The players put forth this alternative story," said the professor. "The world saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be disheartened these days."

However, it's entirely simple to be a team fan these days – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Organization

When intensified enforcement operations started in the city in early June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly issued messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of political issues – a view influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable portion of the supporters, even Latinos, are followers of current leaders. Under significant public pressure, the team subsequently committed $one million in support for individuals directly affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to mark their previous championship victory at the White House – a move that sports writers described as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league team to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent references of that history and the principles it embodies by officials and current and past players. A number of team members including the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the White House during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to pressure from team management.

Corporate Control and Supporter Conflicts

A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own published balance sheets, involve a stake in a detention company that operates detention centers. The group's executives has stated repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance 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-fought World Series triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to support the team?" area writer Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have given the team the fortune it required to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Management

Many fans who share similar misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to back the team and its roster of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the coach and his athletes but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

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

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, goes further than just the organization's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s involved the city razing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then selling the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s record that documents the events has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the house he lost to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most influential Latino writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the organization over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward reality that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Community Bonds

Separating the team from its corporate owners is not a easy task, {