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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad executed one death-defying escape feat after another before winning in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged many negative misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in recent decades.

The play in itself was stunning: Hernández charged in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, game-winning play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great athletic moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the team's direction after appearing for much of the series like the underdog team. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for the city after months of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so easy to be disheartened these days."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other Latinos who show up faithfully to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

After intensified enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to respond to ensuing protests, two of the city's soccer teams quickly released messages of support with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a view influenced, possibly, by the fact that a sizable portion of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain political figures. Under considerable public pressure, the team later pledged $1m in support for families directly affected by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Event and Past Heritage

Three months before, 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 described as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", considering the team's pride in having been the first major league franchise to end the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that history and the principles it represents by officials and current and former athletes. Several team members such as the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the first term but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from team management.

Business Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, as per media reports and its own released financial documents, include a share in a private prison corporation that operates detention facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own type of acquiescence to current policies.

All of that add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino supporters in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant 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 decided his one-man protest must have brought the squad the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Many supporters who share similar misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to back the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his athletes but booed the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

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

Past Context and Community Impact

The problem, though, goes further than only the organization's current owners. The agreement that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s required the municipality demolishing three low-income Hispanic communities on a hill above the city center and then transferring the property to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue stating that the home he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic 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 summer, when demands to avoid the organization over its lack of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening restriction.

Global Players and Community Connections

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {