🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another and then prevailing in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended many negative misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The play itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive out. the second baseman, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't just a great athletic achievement, possibly the decisive turn in the series in the team's favor after looking for much of the series like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy 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, exhibiting a different kind of confidence. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so simple to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a team fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who attend faithfully to home games and occupy as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Mixed Relationship with the Team

After intensified immigration raids started in the city in June, and national guard troops were deployed into the area to react to ensuing protests, two of the city's sports teams quickly released messages of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain political figures. Under significant public pressure, the team later committed $1m in aid for families directly impacted by the operations but issued no public criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous championship victory at the official residence – a move that sports columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering major league team to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by officials and present and former players. Several players such as the manager had voiced reluctance to go to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Business Ownership and Fan Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, as per sources and its own released balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison company that runs detention centers. The group's leadership has said many times that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to certain policies.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won World Series victory and the following outpouring of team support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to support the team?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he decided his personal boycott must have given the team the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Players from the Management

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's reservations seem to have concluded that they can continue to support the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience roared in support of the manager and his athletes but booed the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in suits do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Historical Context and Community Effect

The problem, though, goes further than just the team's present proprietors. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area above the city center and then selling the property to the team for a fraction of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the venue revealing that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship 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 numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly restriction.

International Players and Fan Bonds

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a easy matter, {