🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple dramatic comeback feat after another and then prevailing in extra innings against the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The play in itself was stunning: the outfielder charged in from left field to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great sporting moment, possibly the key shift in momentum in the team's direction after looking for much of the series like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the streets, and a constant stream of negativity from national leaders.

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

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so simple to be demoralized these days."

However, it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats each time.

The Mixed Relationship with the Team

After intensified enforcement operations began in the city in early June, and military units were deployed into the area to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams quickly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president stated the organization want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the reality that a significant minority of the fans, even Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. After considerable external demands, the organization subsequently pledged $one million in support for individuals directly impacted by the raids but made no official condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Heritage

Months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their 2024 World Series win at the White House – a move that local writers described as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that history and the principles it represents by executives and present and past players. A number of players such as the manager had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the first term but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released financial documents, include a stake in a detention corporation that operates detention centers. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain policies.

These factors contribute to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought World Series triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Can one to support the team?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". He was unable to finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have given the squad the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Many fans who share similar reservations appear to have decided that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of international players, featuring the Asian superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate 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 jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in suits do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, goes further than only the organization's present owners. The agreement that moved the former franchise to the city in the 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill above the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that documents the story has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Latino columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic fans while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of response to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Fan Connections

Separating the squad from its business leadership is not a simple task, {