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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense finale on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying comeback act after another and then winning in extra innings over the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning play that at the same time challenged many negative stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially lost in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to record another, decisive out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him backwards.

This was not merely a great athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the team's favor after appearing for most of the series like the weaker side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after months of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of criticism from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said the professor. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be demoralized right now."

However, it's entirely simple to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats per game.

A Mixed Relationship with the Organization

When intensified immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the city's sports teams promptly issued statements of support with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant portion of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of certain leaders. After considerable external demands, the organization later committed $one million in support for individuals personally impacted by the raids but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Historical Heritage

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous championship win at the White House – a decision that local writers labeled as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering major league team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular references of that history and the principles it represents by officials and present and former athletes. Several team members including the coach had expressed unwillingness to go to the White House during the first term but either reconsidered or gave in to pressure from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further issue for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to media reports and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement facilities. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series victory and the ensuing explosion of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the extent that he decided his personal boycott must have given the squad the fortune it required to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Numerous supporters who have similar reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the coach and his athletes but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our players from us," the fan said. "We've been with the team longer than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, goes further than only the team's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s required the city razing three low-income Latino communities on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then transferring the land to the team for a fraction of its market value. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the events has an low-income parking attendant at the venue stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most widely followed Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They've acted around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand 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 raids were contradicted by the awkward reality that attendance at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Stars and Fan Connections

Distinguishing the team from its corporate owners is not a easy matter, {