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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying escape act after another before winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended many negative stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The moment itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from left field to catch a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning play. the second baseman, at second base, caught the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't merely a remarkable sporting moment, perhaps the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for most of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of negativity from national leaders.

"The players presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They are energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so simple to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

A Complicated Connection with the Team

After aggressive enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in early June, and military units were sent into the area to respond to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer clubs promptly issued statements of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the organization want to steer clear of political issues – a stance influenced, possibly, by the fact that a significant minority of the supporters, including Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the organization later committed $one million in aid for individuals personally affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the government.

White House Event and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous World Series win at the official residence – a decision that local writers described as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the first major league franchise to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and current and former athletes. Several team members such as the manager had expressed unwillingness to go to the White House during the initial period but then changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own published balance sheets, include a share in a detention company that operates enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has said many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to current agendas.

These factors add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he believed his one-man boycott must have brought the team the fortune it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Many fans who share similar reservations appear to have concluded that they can keep to support the players and its roster of global players, featuring the Asian megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's business overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the coach and his athletes but booed the team president and the top official of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Past Background and Community Impact

The issue, though, runs deeper than just the team's current owners. The deal that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They've acted around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the warmer months, when demands to avoid the organization over its lack of response to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Fan Bonds

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a easy matter, {