The LA Dodgers Claim the Championship, Yet for Latino Fans, It's Complex

For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense finale last Saturday, when her team executed multiple dramatic comeback feat after another before prevailing in overtime against the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged many negative stereotypes promoted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This was not just a remarkable sporting achievement, perhaps the key shift in the series in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for much of the series like the weaker team. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of criticism from official sources.

"The players presented this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

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

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand seats each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids started in the city in early June, and military troops were deployed into the city to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local sports teams promptly released statements of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

Management stated the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable portion of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of current leaders. After considerable public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in support for families personally impacted by the raids but made no official condemnation of the government.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous championship victory at the official residence – a move that sports writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional team to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and current and past players. Several players such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the event during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Business Ownership and Fan Conflicts

An additional complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to sources and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a detention company that runs detention centers. Guggenheim's leadership has stated repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to certain policies.

All of that contribute to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino fans in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought championship victory and the ensuing outpouring of team pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to support the team?" area columnist one observer agonized at the start of the postseason in an elegant article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he decided his personal boycott must have brought the team the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Management

Many fans who have similar reservations appear to have concluded that they can keep to support the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's business leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the manager and his players but booed the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

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

Historical Context and Community Effect

The issue, though, goes further than just the organization's current proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then transferring the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the events has an impoverished worker at the venue stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They've acted around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were upended by the awkward reality that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Fan Bonds

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