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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad pulled off one dramatic escape feat after another before winning in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously challenged many harmful stereotypes promoted about Latinos in the past decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This was not just a great athletic achievement, possibly the decisive turn in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for most of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so simple to be demoralized right now."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers fan these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats per game.

The Mixed Relationship with the Organization

After aggressive enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer clubs promptly issued statements of support with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization want to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a significant portion of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of certain political figures. After significant public pressure, the organization later pledged $one million in aid for families personally affected by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the government.

Official Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a decision that sports columnists described as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by executives and present and past players. A number of team members including the coach had voiced reluctance to go to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Dilemmas

A further complication for fans is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own published financial documents, include a share in a detention company that runs detention facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated many times that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to current agendas.

These factors add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought World Series victory and the ensuing outpouring of team support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the team?" local writer one observer agonized at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful article pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his personal protest must have brought the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to support the team and its roster of global stars, featuring the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's business leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the manager and his players but booed the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, however, runs deeper than just the team's present owners. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the municipality razing three working-class Latino communities on a hill above downtown and then transferring the property to the team for a fraction of its market value. A song on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he lost to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, problematic relationship between the team and its fanbase. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They have acted around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when the city center was under to a nightly restriction.

International Players and Fan Bonds

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