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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying comeback feat after another before prevailing in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive play that at the same time challenged numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to record another, game-winning play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a remarkable sporting moment, possibly the key turn in the series in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for most of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after months of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

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

However, it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids began in the city in June, and military units were deployed into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the local soccer clubs promptly released statements of solidarity with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of political issues – a stance influenced, possibly, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current leaders. After significant public pressure, the team later committed $1m in support for individuals directly affected by the raids but made no public criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series win at the official residence – a decision that local writers described as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it represents by officials and current and former players. A number of team members including the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the first term but then changed their minds or gave in to demands from the organization.

Business Ownership and Fan Conflicts

An additional complication for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a private prison corporation that runs detention facilities. The group's leadership has stated repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to certain agendas.

All of that contribute to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the following outpouring of team support across the city.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the team the fortune it required to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Many supporters who share similar reservations appear to have concluded that they can keep to back the players and its roster of global players, including the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire don't get to claim our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Context and Community Impact

The problem, however, runs deeper than only the organization's current proprietors. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then transferring the property to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 record that documents the events has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the home he lost to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most influential Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They have put one arm around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano wrote over the summer, when calls to avoid the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward reality that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Community Bonds

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {