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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off one dramatic escape act after another before prevailing in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

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

The moment itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from left field to catch a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him to the ground.

This wasn't just a remarkable sporting moment, possibly the key turn in the series in the team's direction after appearing for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They are energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

The Mixed Relationship with the Team

After intensified immigration raids started in the city in June, and military units were deployed into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the local sports teams promptly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the fact that a significant minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current political figures. After considerable external demands, the organization later pledged $1m in support for families directly impacted by the raids but made no public criticism of the government.

Official Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their previous championship victory at the official residence – a move that local columnists described as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first major league franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it represents by executives and current and former players. A number of players such as the coach had expressed reluctance to travel to the White House during the initial period but then changed their minds or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Conflicts

A further issue for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own released financial documents, include a stake in a detention corporation that runs enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's executives has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

All of that add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino supporters in particular – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought championship victory and the ensuing outpouring of team support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local writer Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He 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 brought the squad the luck it needed to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Management

Many fans who share similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to back the players and its lineup of international stars, including the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd roared in support of the manager and his athletes but jeered the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in suits don't get to take our players from us," the fan said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Historical Background and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, however, runs deeper than only the team's present proprietors. The agreement that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s required the city razing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area above downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 record that documents the events has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the home he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, perhaps southern California most widely followed Latino writer and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fanbase. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They have acted around Hispanic fans while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the organization over its absence of reaction to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Fan Bonds

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a simple task, {