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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another before prevailing in overtime against the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time upended many harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not merely a remarkable sporting moment, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for most of the series like the weaker side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for the community and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so easy to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats per game.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids started in the city in June, and military troops were deployed into the city to respond to resulting protests, two of the local sports teams promptly issued statements of support with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a view influenced, possibly, by the fact that a sizable minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the organization subsequently pledged $one million in aid for individuals personally affected by the operations but made no public criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an offer to celebrate their 2024 World Series win at the official residence – a move that sports writers labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the first major league team to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it embodies by executives and present and former players. A number of players including the coach had expressed reluctance to travel to the White House during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to sources and its own released financial documents, include a stake in a detention company that operates detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said 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 compliance to certain agendas.

These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful article pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he believed his personal protest must have brought the squad the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Management

Numerous supporters who have similar reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to support the team and its roster of international stars, featuring the Asian superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's business overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience roared in approval of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

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

Historical Background and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, however, goes further than just the organization's present proprietors. The deal that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the municipality demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown 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 impoverished worker at the venue stating that the house he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They've acted around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the summer, when demands to avoid the organization over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward fact that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a nightly curfew.

Global Stars and Community Connections

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