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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the World Series didn't happen during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off one dramatic comeback feat after another before prevailing in extra innings against the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning play that simultaneously challenged many harmful stereotypes touted about Latinos in recent decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from left field to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to record another, decisive out. the second baseman, at second base, caught the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not merely a great sporting moment, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for the city after months of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.

"The players presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They are energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be demoralized these days."

However, it's exactly straightforward to be a team supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 spots each time.

The Mixed Relationship with the Team

After intensified enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the local sports teams quickly issued messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a stance colored, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. After considerable public pressure, the team later committed $1m in aid for families personally impacted by the operations but made no official criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous World Series win at the White House – a decision that sports writers described as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and present and past athletes. Several team members including the coach had voiced reluctance to travel to the event during the initial period but then reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Conflicts

A further complication for fans is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, involve a stake in a detention company that runs enforcement centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought championship triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the team?" area writer Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he believed his personal protest must have brought the team the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Players from the Management

Many supporters who share Galindo's reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to support the players and its roster of global players, including the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience cheered in support of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

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

Historical Background and Community Effect

The issue, though, goes further than only the team's present owners. The agreement that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Latino communities on a elevated area above the city center and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the venue stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the summer, when calls to avoid the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward reality that attendance at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a evening restriction.

Global Players and Community Bonds

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