🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not happen during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her team executed multiple death-defying escape feat after another before prevailing in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that simultaneously challenged numerous harmful stereotypes promoted about Latinos in recent decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from left field to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, sending him backwards.

This was not merely a remarkable athletic achievement, possibly the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for most of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for the community and for the city after months of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so simple to be demoralized right now."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan these days – for her or for the many of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

A Complicated Relationship with the Organization

After intensified immigration raids started in the city in June, and military units were sent into the city to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local sports teams promptly issued messages of support with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

Management stated the organization want to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the fact that a sizable minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain political figures. After significant public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in aid for families personally affected by the raids but issued no public criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Months before, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous championship victory at the White House – a move that local writers described as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league franchise to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular references of that history and the principles it embodies by executives and current and past athletes. A number of players including the coach had voiced reluctance to go to the event during the first term but then changed their minds or gave in to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, include a share in a detention corporation that runs detention facilities. The group's executives has said many times that it aims to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to certain policies.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino supporters in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought World Series triumph and the following explosion of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the team?" area columnist one observer reflected at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He couldn't finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have given the squad the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Management

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to back the players and its lineup of global stars, including the Asian megastar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the manager 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 players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Historical Context and Community Effect

The issue, however, runs deeper than only the team's current owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the city razing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the land to the team for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 record that documents the story has an impoverished worker at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fanbase. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've acted around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

International Players and Fan Bonds

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