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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't happen during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying comeback act after another and then winning in overtime over the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended many negative stereotypes touted about Latinos in the past years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from left field to snag a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This was not merely a remarkable athletic moment, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the team's favor after appearing for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," explained the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers fan these days – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to home games and occupy as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats per game.

A Complicated Connection with the Organization

After aggressive enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard units were sent into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the city's sports teams quickly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the supporters, even Latinos, are followers of current political figures. Under significant external demands, the team later committed $1m in aid for families personally affected by the raids but made no official condemnation of the government.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous championship win at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists described as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the values it embodies by officials and present and past players. A number of team members including the coach had voiced reluctance to go to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Business Ownership and Fan Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a private prison corporation that runs enforcement centers. Guggenheim's leadership has stated repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain policies.

These factors contribute to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across the city.

"Is it okay to support the team?" local columnist one observer reflected at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He couldn't ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his one-man protest must have brought the team the luck it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many fans who have Galindo's reservations appear to have decided that they can keep to support the players and its lineup of international players, including the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience 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 do not get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the team longer than they have."

Past Background and Community Impact

The issue, however, runs deeper than just the team's present proprietors. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then transferring the property to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They've acted around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to avoid the organization over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

International Players and Community Bonds

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