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For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the World Series did not happen during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her team executed multiple death-defying escape feat after another and then winning in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, decisive sequence that simultaneously challenged many harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The moment itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to record another, decisive play. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great athletic moment, perhaps the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for much of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"The players presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who show up regularly to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

A Complicated Connection with the Organization

After aggressive enforcement operations began in the city in June, and national guard units were sent into the area to react to resulting protests, two of the local soccer clubs quickly issued statements of solidarity with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

The team president stated the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a view influenced, possibly, by the fact that a sizable portion of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain leaders. After considerable external demands, the organization later committed $one million in support for families directly affected by the operations but issued no official criticism of the administration.

Official Visit and Historical Heritage

Months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to mark their previous championship victory at the official residence – a move that local writers described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first major league team to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and current and past players. A number of team members such as the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released balance sheets, involve a stake in a private prison corporation that runs enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to certain policies.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship victory and the following explosion of team support across the city.

"Can one to support the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have given the team the fortune it needed to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Numerous fans who have similar reservations seem to have concluded that they can keep to support the players and its lineup of international players, including the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's business overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the manager and his athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

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

Historical Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than only the team's current owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three low-income Latino 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 2005 album that chronicles the events has an impoverished worker at the venue revealing that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most influential Latino columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, problematic relationship between the team and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets 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 boycott the organization over its absence of response to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Fan Bonds

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a simple matter, {