🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the World Series didn't occur during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off one dramatic escape feat after another before prevailing in extra innings against the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that simultaneously upended many negative stereotypes promoted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The moment in itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not merely a great athletic moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It is so easy to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for Molina or for the many of other fans who show up faithfully to home games and occupy as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.

A Complicated Relationship with the Team

After intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to respond to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer teams promptly issued messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

Management stated the organization want to stay away of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable portion of the supporters, even Latinos, are supporters of certain political figures. After considerable external demands, the team later committed $1m in aid for families directly impacted by the raids but issued no official criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Historical Heritage

Three months before, the organization did not delay in accepting an invitation to celebrate their 2024 championship victory at the White House – a move that sports columnists described as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent references of that legacy and the values it embodies by officials and present and past athletes. Several team members including the manager had expressed reluctance to travel to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Business Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, according to sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a share in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino supporters in particular – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won championship triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local columnist one observer agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our minds". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Management

Numerous fans who have similar misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to support the players and its lineup of international players, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's business overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the packed audience roared in approval of the manager and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in suits do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We've been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Past Context and Community Impact

The issue, though, goes further than only the organization's present proprietors. The agreement that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the city razing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then transferring the land to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s album that documents the events has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They have put one arm 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 warmer months, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of reaction to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly restriction.

International Stars and Community Connections

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