🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't happen during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her team executed one dramatic escape feat after another and then winning in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged numerous negative stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from left field to catch a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, decisive play. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't just a great athletic moment, perhaps the decisive shift in the series in the team's favor after looking for much of the games like the weaker side. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be disheartened these days."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and occupy as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

After intensified enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were deployed into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local soccer clubs promptly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

The team president has said the organization prefer to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, possibly, by the reality that a sizable portion of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. After considerable external demands, the organization later pledged $1m in support for individuals personally affected by the operations but issued no official criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Past Heritage

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to mark their 2024 World Series victory at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", given the team's boast in having been the pioneering professional team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the principles it embodies by executives and current and former athletes. A number of team members such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the White House during the initial period but then changed their minds or gave in to pressure from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to sources and its own published financial documents, involve a stake in a private prison company that runs enforcement centers. The group's executives has stated many times that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series victory and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have brought the team the fortune it needed to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Many fans who share Galindo's reservations seem to have concluded that they can continue to support the team and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's business overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the packed audience roared in support of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, goes further than only the team's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area above the city center and then transferring the land to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A track on a 2005 album that documents the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when calls to avoid the organization over its lack 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 downtown LA was under to a evening restriction.

International Players and Fan Connections

Distinguishing the team from its corporate owners is not a simple task, {