🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another before winning in extra innings against the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, decisive play that at the same time upended many harmful stereotypes touted about Latinos in recent years.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to record another, game-winning out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't just a remarkable athletic achievement, possibly the key shift in the series in the team's favor after looking for most of the series like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for the city after months of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of criticism from official sources.

"The players put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so simple to be demoralized these days."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan these days – for her or for the many of other fans who show up regularly to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

When intensified enforcement operations began in the city in early June, and military troops were deployed into the area to react to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer clubs promptly released messages of support with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

The team president stated the organization want to stay away of politics – a view influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in aid for individuals directly affected by the operations but issued no official condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Past Heritage

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to mark their previous World Series victory at the White House – a move that sports columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", considering the team's boast in having been the pioneering major league franchise to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by executives and current and past athletes. Several team members including the coach had expressed reluctance to travel to the event during the initial period but then changed their minds or gave in to demands from team management.

Business Control and Supporter Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own released financial documents, involve a stake in a private prison company that operates detention centers. Guggenheim's executives has said many times that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to certain policies.

These factors add up to significant conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won championship victory and the following explosion of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to root for the team?" area columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the squad the luck it required to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous fans who share similar reservations seem to have concluded that they can continue to support the players and its lineup of global players, including the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's business 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 coach and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

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

Historical Context and Community Effect

The issue, though, runs deeper than just the team's present proprietors. The agreement that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Hispanic communities on a hill overlooking the city center and then selling the land to the team for a small part of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s album that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the house he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when calls to avoid the organization over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Stars and Fan Bonds

Distinguishing the squad from its corporate owners is not a easy task, {