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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 final game last Saturday, when her team executed multiple death-defying escape feat after another and then winning in extra innings against the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning play that simultaneously upended many negative stereotypes touted about Latinos in recent decades.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially lost in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to record another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not just a great sporting moment, possibly the decisive turn in momentum in the team's favor after appearing for most of the series like the weaker team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"The players presented this alternative story," said the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, 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's so simple to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who attend regularly to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 seats per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When intensified immigration raids started in Los Angeles in June, and military units were deployed into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams quickly issued statements of support with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a significant portion of the fans, including Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently committed $one million in support for families directly impacted by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the government.

White House Visit and Past Heritage

Months before, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their previous championship win at the White House – a move that sports columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", given the team's boast in having been the first professional franchise to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and current and past athletes. Several players including the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the event during the first term but then changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, as per sources and its own released balance sheets, involve a stake in a private prison company that runs enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's executives has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

All of that contribute to considerable conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of team support across the city.

"Can one to root for the team?" local writer one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful article pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he decided his personal boycott must have given the team the fortune it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Numerous fans who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have decided that they can continue to back the team and its roster of global players, including the Asian megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate leadership. 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 athletes but booed the team president and the chief executive of the ownership group.

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

Past Context and Community Effect

The issue, though, runs deeper than only the organization's current proprietors. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the city razing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 record that documents the events has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, 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 business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer noted over the summer, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Community Bonds

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