🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't happen during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic comeback feat after another before winning in extra innings over the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended many negative stereotypes promoted about Latinos in recent decades.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, decisive play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a great sporting moment, possibly the key turn in the series in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for most of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for the city after a period of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It's so simple to be demoralized right now."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 spots per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Organization

When intensified enforcement operations started in the city in June, and military units were deployed into the area to react to ensuing protests, two of the city's sports teams promptly issued statements of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of current leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the organization subsequently pledged $1m in aid for individuals directly affected by the operations but made no official condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Legacy

Months before, the team did not delay in agreeing to an offer to mark their previous championship victory at the official residence – a move that sports columnists labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the principles it represents by officials and present and former players. A number of players such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but then changed their minds or gave in to pressure from team management.

Business Control and Fan Conflicts

An additional complication for supporters is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, include a share in a private prison company that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won championship victory and the following outpouring of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" area columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have given the team the fortune it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Numerous supporters who have similar misgivings appear to have concluded that they can keep to support the team and its lineup of international stars, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in support of the manager and his athletes but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in suits don't get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Historical Background and Community Impact

The problem, though, goes further than just the team's present proprietors. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill above downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the venue stating that the home he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fanbase. 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 fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the team over its lack of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was under to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Community Bonds

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