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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying escape feat after another before prevailing in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that at the same time upended numerous negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a remarkable sporting moment, perhaps the key shift in the series in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

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

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

When intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local sports teams quickly released messages of support with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

Management stated the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a view influenced, possibly, by the fact that a sizable portion of the fans, even Latinos, are followers of current leaders. Under significant public pressure, the organization later committed $one million in support for families directly affected by the operations but made no public condemnation of the administration.

Official Visit and Past Heritage

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in accepting an offer to mark their previous World Series win at the official residence – a move that local writers described as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering major league franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular references of that history and the values it represents by officials and present and past players. A number of team members such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Ownership and Fan Conflicts

An additional complication for fans is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own released financial documents, include a stake in a private prison company that runs enforcement facilities. The group's leadership has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to current policies.

All of that add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won championship victory and the following explosion of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to support the team?" area writer one observer reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant article pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he decided his one-man boycott must have brought the team the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Many supporters who share Galindo's misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to support the team and its lineup of international stars, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the manager and his players but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"These men in suits don't get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, however, runs deeper than just the organization's current owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s album that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he lost to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most widely followed Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic fans while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the team over its absence of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Stars and Community Connections

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