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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the World Series didn't occur during the tense final game last Saturday, when her squad executed multiple death-defying comeback feat after another and then winning in overtime over the opposing team.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning play that at the same time challenged many negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The play 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 secure another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not merely a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the team's favor after looking for most of the series like the weaker side. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this counter-narrative," said Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented 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."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who show up regularly to matches and occupy as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

A Mixed Relationship with the Organization

After aggressive enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in early June, and military units were sent into the area to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams quickly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization want to stay away of politics – a view colored, possibly, by the fact that a sizable minority of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain leaders. After considerable public pressure, the team later committed $1m in support for individuals personally impacted by the raids but made no public criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the White House – a decision that sports columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league team to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular references of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and current and past players. Several team members including the coach had expressed unwillingness to go to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or gave in to pressure from team management.

Business Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

A further complication for supporters is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a detention company that operates enforcement centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said many times that it aims to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to current agendas.

These factors contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought championship triumph and the following explosion of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" local writer Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an elegant article pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have given the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who share Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its roster of international players, including the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in support of the manager and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"These men in suits do not get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, however, goes further than only the organization's present owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s required the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic communities on a elevated area above the city center and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the events has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most influential Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the organization over its absence of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Stars and Fan Bonds

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