🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad executed multiple dramatic escape feat after another before winning in extra innings over the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended numerous negative stereotypes promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The play itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to record another, decisive play. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not merely a remarkable athletic moment, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the team's favor after appearing for much of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for the city after a period of immigration raids, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Complicated Connection with the Team

After intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were deployed into the area to react to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer clubs quickly issued statements of solidarity with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

The team president stated the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of political issues – a view influenced, possibly, by the fact that a significant minority of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of current political figures. Under significant external demands, the organization later pledged $one million in aid for families personally impacted by the raids but issued no public criticism of the government.

White House Event and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous World Series win at the official residence – a decision that sports writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", considering the team's boast in having been the first major league franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular references of that history and the principles it represents by executives and present and past players. Several players including the manager had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but then reconsidered or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Business Ownership and Fan Conflicts

A further complication for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a stake in a detention corporation that operates enforcement centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said many times that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics 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 especial – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought championship victory and the following explosion of Dodgers support across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his one-man boycott must have given the squad the luck it needed to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's reservations seem to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its roster of international stars, including the Asian megastar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in support of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire don't get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We've been with the team longer than they have."

Historical Background and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, however, goes further than only the team's current owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the municipality demolishing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area above the city center and then selling the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an impoverished worker at the venue revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Latino writer and media personality, 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 unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They've 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," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the team over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a nightly curfew.

Global Stars and Community Connections

Separating the team from its business leadership is not a simple matter, {