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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying comeback feat after another before winning in overtime over the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged many harmful stereotypes promoted about Latinos in the past decades.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, game-winning play. the second baseman, at second base, received the ball moments before a runner collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't just a great athletic moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the team's favor after looking for most of the games like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so easy to be disheartened right now."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 spots per game.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

After intensified enforcement operations began in the city in June, and military troops were deployed into the city to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local sports clubs quickly released messages of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

Management has said the Dodgers prefer to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, possibly, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, including Latinos, are followers of current political figures. After significant public pressure, the team later pledged $1m in support for individuals directly affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the government.

Official Event and Historical Legacy

Months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous championship victory at the White House – a decision that local writers described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by executives and current and past players. A number of team members such as the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a detention company that operates detention centers. Guggenheim's executives has stated repeatedly that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

All of that add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he decided his one-man boycott must have given the team the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many fans who have similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to support the players and its roster of international players, including the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's business leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the manager and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in suits do not get to claim our players from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, however, runs deeper than only the team's present owners. The deal that moved the former franchise to the city in the 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the house he lost to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, problematic dynamic between the team and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to avoid the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was under to a nightly restriction.

International Players and Fan Connections

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a easy task, {