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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense final game last Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another and then prevailing in overtime over 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 at the same time upended many harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This was not just a great athletic moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for most of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for the city after months of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the streets, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"The players presented this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

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

However, it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for her or for the many of other fans who show up faithfully to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Complicated Connection with the Organization

When intensified immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to respond to resulting protests, two of the city's sports clubs promptly issued messages of support with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

The team president has said the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the reality that a sizable portion of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. Under significant public pressure, the team later committed $1m in aid for families directly impacted by the operations but made no public criticism of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a decision that sports writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the first major league franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the principles it represents by executives and present and past players. Several players such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to demands from team management.

Business Ownership and Fan Conflicts

A further issue for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a private prison corporation that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain agendas.

These factors contribute to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought World Series triumph and the following explosion of team support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" local writer one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our minds". He couldn't finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his personal boycott must have brought the team the luck it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Management

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can keep to support the players and its lineup of international players, including the Japanese superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's business leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the manager and his athletes but jeered the team president and the top official of the investors.

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

Historical Background and Community Impact

The problem, however, runs deeper than only the organization's current owners. The deal that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the events has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the house he lost to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack 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 Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the warmer months, when demands to avoid the team over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward reality that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Community Connections

Distinguishing the squad from its business leadership is not a easy task, {