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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense finale on Saturday, when her team executed multiple dramatic escape feat after another and then winning in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened a game earlier, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, game-winning play that simultaneously upended many harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. the second baseman, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't just a great sporting moment, possibly the key turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after looking for much of the series like the weaker side. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," said the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so simple to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers fan these days – for her or for the many of other Latinos who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Organization

When intensified immigration raids started in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were sent into the area to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's sports teams promptly released messages of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

Management stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a stance influenced, possibly, by the reality that a significant minority of the supporters, including Latinos, are followers of current leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $one million in support for individuals directly affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the administration.

Official Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in accepting an offer to celebrate their previous World Series win at the White House – a move that sports columnists labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional franchise to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by executives and current and former athletes. Several team members such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Business Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

An additional complication for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, include a share in a detention company that runs enforcement centers. Guggenheim's executives has stated many times that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its critics say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the squad the luck it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's reservations appear to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of international players, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire don't get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, however, goes further than only the organization's current proprietors. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the venue stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most widely followed Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the organization over its lack of reaction to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a evening restriction.

Global Stars and Community Bonds

Distinguishing the team from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {