🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the World Series did not occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her team pulled off one dramatic escape feat after another before prevailing in overtime against the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that at the same time upended many harmful misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to record another, decisive out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This wasn't just a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive shift in the series in the Dodgers' favor after looking for most of the series like the underdog side. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after months of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," explained Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so easy to be demoralized right now."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers fan these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats each time.

A Mixed Relationship with the Organization

When aggressive immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, and national guard troops were deployed into the area to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local soccer clubs promptly issued messages of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization prefer to steer clear of political issues – a stance influenced, possibly, by the fact that a sizable minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. Under significant public pressure, the team later pledged $1m in support for families personally affected by the operations but issued no public criticism of the government.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous World Series win at the official residence – a decision that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent references of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and present and past players. A number of players such as the coach had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Business Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison corporation that runs enforcement facilities. The group's leadership has said many times that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to current agendas.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the following explosion of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his one-man protest must have brought the squad the luck it needed to win.

Separating the Players from the Management

Many supporters who share similar reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to support the team and its roster of global stars, featuring the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the coach and his athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in suits don't get to take our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Community Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than only the team's present owners. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the municipality razing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area above downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue revealing that the house he lost to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They have acted around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the summer, when calls to avoid the organization over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

International Players and Fan Connections

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