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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic escape act after another before winning in extra innings over the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that at the same time upended many harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent decades.

The moment in itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, decisive out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't just a remarkable athletic moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the team's favor after appearing for much of the series like the underdog team. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"The players put forth this counter-narrative," said Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're yelling, 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 simple to be demoralized these days."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan these days – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 spots per game.

A Complicated Relationship with the Organization

When aggressive enforcement operations began in the city in early June, and military troops were deployed into the city to respond to resulting protests, two of the local sports clubs quickly issued messages of solidarity with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization want to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the fact that a significant portion of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in support for families personally affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Event and Past Heritage

Months before, the team did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series win at the White House – a move that local writers labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's boast in having been the pioneering major league team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by officials and current and past players. A number of players including the manager had expressed unwillingness to go to the event during the initial period but either reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Business Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, as per sources and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a private prison company that runs enforcement facilities. The group's executives has stated repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to certain policies.

These factors add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of team pride across the city.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant article pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he decided his personal protest must have given the squad the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Many supporters who have similar reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its roster of international stars, including the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

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

Past Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, goes further than just the team's present proprietors. The deal that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the municipality demolishing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area above the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the team and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They have acted around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer noted over the summer, when calls to boycott the organization over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was under to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Community Connections

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