🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight 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 against the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that at the same time challenged many harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The moment itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to record another, game-winning play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not just a great athletic moment, perhaps the decisive turn in the series in the team's direction after looking for much of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for the community and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're 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 right now."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend regularly to matches and fill up as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Complicated Relationship with the Organization

When aggressive enforcement operations started in the city in June, and military units were deployed into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams promptly issued statements of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

Management stated the organization prefer to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of current leaders. After considerable public pressure, the organization subsequently committed $1m in aid for families directly affected by the raids but issued no official condemnation of the administration.

Official Visit and Past Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to mark their 2024 championship win at the official residence – a decision that sports writers labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional team to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by officials and current and past players. A number of team members such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Business Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a private prison corporation that runs enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated repeatedly that it aims to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to current policies.

These factors add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-won championship victory and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" local writer one observer reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our minds". He was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he decided his personal boycott must have brought the squad the fortune it required to win.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Numerous fans who share Galindo's reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to support the players and its roster of global stars, featuring the Asian superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the coach and his athletes but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"These men in suits do not get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, goes further than just the organization's current proprietors. The deal that moved the former franchise to the city in the 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s record that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the home he lost to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, problematic dynamic between the team and its audience. He describes the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans 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 demands to avoid the organization over its lack of response to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a evening curfew.

International Players and Fan Bonds

Separating the team from its business leadership is not a easy task, {