🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense finale last Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying comeback act after another and then prevailing in extra innings over the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive play that simultaneously challenged many harmful misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not just a remarkable athletic achievement, possibly the decisive turn in the series in the Dodgers' direction after looking for much of the games like the underdog team. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"The players put forth this alternative story," said the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so easy to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 spots each time.

The Mixed Connection with the Organization

After intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were deployed into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer clubs promptly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

Management has said the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a view influenced, possibly, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the organization subsequently committed $1m in aid for families personally impacted by the raids but issued no public criticism of the government.

Official Visit and Historical Heritage

Months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their 2024 championship win at the White House – a move that sports columnists described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering major league team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the principles it represents by officials and current and former players. Several team members including the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but then changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for fans is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own released financial documents, involve a share in a detention corporation that runs detention facilities. The group's leadership has said many times that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won World Series victory and the ensuing outpouring of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the team?" local columnist one observer reflected at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful article pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he decided his one-man protest must have given the team the luck it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who have similar misgivings seem to have decided that they can continue to support the players and its lineup of global stars, including the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the packed audience roared in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in suits don't get to claim our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Historical Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than only the organization's present owners. The agreement that moved the former franchise to the city in the 1950s required the city demolishing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then transferring the property to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s record that documents the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue revealing that the home he forfeited to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly southern California most influential Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the warmer months, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at home games remained steady, even at the height of the protests when the city center was subject to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Fan Connections

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a easy matter, {