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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her team pulled off one death-defying comeback act after another before prevailing in overtime against the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, decisive play that simultaneously upended many harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past decades.

The play in itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This wasn't just a great athletic moment, possibly the decisive turn in the series in the Dodgers' direction after looking for most of the series like the underdog side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," said Molina. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so easy to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 spots per game.

A Complicated Connection with the Team

After intensified enforcement operations started in the city in June, and military troops were sent into the area to react to ensuing protests, two of the local sports teams quickly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant minority of the fans, including Latinos, are supporters of certain leaders. After considerable external demands, the organization later committed $one million in aid for families personally affected by the raids but issued no official criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the organization did not delay in accepting an offer to mark their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a move that sports columnists labeled as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", considering the team's pride in having been the first professional team to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the principles it embodies by executives and present and past athletes. A number of players including the manager had expressed unwillingness to go to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Business Ownership and Fan Conflicts

A further complication for supporters is that the team are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to media reports and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a detention company that runs detention centers. The group's leadership has said many times that it aims to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to current agendas.

All of that add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in especial – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the team?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". He was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he believed his personal boycott must have brought the team the fortune it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Numerous fans who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to support the team and its lineup of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire do not get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Background and Community Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than just the organization's present owners. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then transferring the land to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets 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 avoid the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the protests when the city center was under to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Fan Bonds

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a simple task, {