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For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense finale on Saturday, when her team executed one death-defying comeback act after another and then prevailing in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, decisive play that simultaneously upended numerous harmful stereotypes touted about Latinos in recent years.

The moment itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, decisive out. the second baseman, at second base, received the ball moments before a runner collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't just a remarkable sporting achievement, perhaps the key turn in momentum in the team's favor after looking for most of the series like the weaker side. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"The players put forth this alternative story," said the professor. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be demoralized right now."

However, it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 spots per game.

The Mixed Relationship with the Team

After aggressive immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly released statements of support with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant portion of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of current leaders. After significant public pressure, the organization later committed $1m in support for families personally affected by the operations but issued no official criticism of the government.

Official Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous championship win at the official residence – a move that local columnists labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's boast in having been the first professional team to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the frequent references of that history and the values it embodies by executives and present and former players. A number of players such as the coach had voiced unwillingness to go to the White House during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Business Control and Fan Conflicts

An additional complication for supporters is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, 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 facilities. The group's leadership has said repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to certain policies.

All of that add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino fans in especial – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the following outpouring of team support across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his one-man protest must have brought the squad the fortune it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Management

Many supporters who have similar reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to support the team and its roster of international stars, featuring the Asian superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in suits do not get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the team longer than they have."

Historical Background and Community Effect

The problem, though, goes further than just the team's current proprietors. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the home he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the team and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when demands to avoid the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

International Stars and Community Bonds

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