🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic escape feat after another and then prevailing in extra innings against the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, game-winning play that at the same time upended numerous negative misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent decades.

The play in itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, decisive play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not merely a remarkable athletic moment, possibly the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for much of the series like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for the city after months of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be disheartened right now."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for her or for the many of other fans who attend 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 Organization

When aggressive enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in June, and national guard units were sent into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams promptly released messages of solidarity with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of politics – a stance colored, possibly, by the fact that a significant portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current leaders. After significant external demands, the organization subsequently committed $1m in support for families directly affected by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the government.

Official Event and Historical Heritage

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a move that local writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering major league franchise to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that history and the values it embodies by officials and present and past players. A number of players including the manager had expressed unwillingness to go to the event during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further complication for fans is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own published financial documents, include a share in a detention corporation that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated many times that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to certain agendas.

These factors add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won championship triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across the city.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" area columnist one observer agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have given the squad the fortune it needed to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Management

Many supporters who share Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to back the team and its roster of international players, including the Asian megastar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the manager and his players but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"These men in suits do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, however, runs deeper than only the organization's present owners. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the city razing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the land to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s album that documents the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue stating that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly southern California most widely followed Latino writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for years.

"They've acted around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer noted over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Fan Connections

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