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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad executed multiple death-defying comeback feat after another and then prevailing in overtime against the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that simultaneously upended many negative misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This was not merely a great athletic moment, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for much of the series like the underdog side. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of negativity from national leaders.

"The players put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so simple to be disheartened these days."

However, it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for her or for the many of other Latinos who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 spots each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When intensified immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard units were sent into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports clubs promptly issued statements of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the organization want to stay away of political issues – a stance colored, possibly, by the reality that a significant portion of the fans, including Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. After significant public pressure, the team subsequently committed $one million in aid for families directly affected by the operations but made no public criticism of the administration.

White House Event and Past Heritage

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous World Series victory at the White House – a decision that sports columnists described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first professional franchise to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and present and former players. A number of team members such as the manager had voiced reluctance to go to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Control and Fan Conflicts

A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a detention company that operates detention centers. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it aims to stay out of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to certain agendas.

These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in especial – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought championship triumph and the following explosion of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our minds". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he decided his one-man protest must have brought the team the luck it required to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Management

Many fans who share Galindo's reservations appear to have decided that they can keep to back the players and its roster of international players, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the manager and his athletes but booed the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

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

Historical Context and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, though, goes further than just the organization's present owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area above downtown and then selling the land to the team for a small part of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the events has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the summer, when demands to boycott the organization over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Fan Bonds

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