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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 executed multiple dramatic escape feat after another before prevailing in extra innings over the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The moment itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from left field to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive play. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not merely a remarkable sporting moment, possibly the key shift in the series in the team's direction after appearing for most of the games like the weaker team. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the streets, and a steady stream of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said Molina. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so easy to be demoralized these days."

However, it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats each time.

The Complicated Connection with the Team

When aggressive enforcement operations began in the city in June, and national guard units were deployed into the area to react to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer clubs quickly issued statements of support with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

Management stated the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the reality that a significant minority of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current leaders. Under significant external demands, the organization subsequently pledged $one million in aid for individuals personally affected by the operations but made no official criticism of the government.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Three months before, the team did not delay in accepting an offer to mark their previous championship win at the official residence – a move that local writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering major league team to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that history and the principles it embodies by officials and present and former athletes. A number of players including the coach had expressed reluctance to travel to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Corporate Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, include a share in a private prison corporation that operates detention centers. The group's executives has stated many times that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

These factors contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-won World Series victory and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have brought the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous fans who have similar reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to support the players and its roster of international players, featuring the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the manager and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"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 Community Effect

The problem, however, goes further than only the team's current proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill above the city center and then transferring the property to the team for a fraction of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s record that documents the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They have acted around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its absence of response to the raids were contradicted by the awkward reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Community Bonds

Separating the squad from its business leadership is not a easy task, {