🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series didn't occur during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple dramatic comeback feat after another and then prevailing in overtime over the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended many harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent years.

The play in itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the team's direction after appearing for most of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after a period of immigration raids, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," said Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, 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 disheartened right now."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter these days – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who attend regularly to matches and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats per game.

A Complicated Relationship with the Team

When intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the local soccer clubs promptly issued messages of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a significant minority of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain leaders. After significant public pressure, the team later committed $1m in aid for individuals personally impacted by the operations but made no public criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Past Heritage

Months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their 2024 championship win at the White House – a move that sports columnists described as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the first professional team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it represents by executives and current and former athletes. Several players such as the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the event during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to demands from team management.

Business Control and Supporter Conflicts

A further issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released financial documents, involve a stake in a detention company that operates enforcement facilities. The group's executives has stated many times that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to certain policies.

These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to support the team?" local columnist one observer reflected at the start of the postseason 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 championship, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he believed his one-man protest must have given the team the fortune it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Many supporters who share similar misgivings appear to have concluded that they can continue to support the team and its roster of global players, including the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience roared in approval of the manager and his athletes but booed the executive and the top official of the investors.

"These men in suits don't get to take our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, however, goes further than just the team's present proprietors. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then selling the land to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the venue revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, problematic dynamic between the team and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the summer, when demands to boycott the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Community Bonds

Separating the team from its business leadership is not a easy matter, {