🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense final game last Saturday, when her squad executed one dramatic comeback feat after another and then winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, decisive play that simultaneously upended numerous harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past years.

The moment in itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from left field to catch a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive play. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner collided with him, sending him to the ground.

This wasn't just a remarkable athletic moment, possibly the decisive turn in the series in the team's favor after appearing for most of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"The players presented this alternative story," said Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're cheering, 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's so easy to be demoralized right now."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to matches and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Complicated Relationship with the Team

After intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in early June, and military troops were deployed into the city to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's soccer teams promptly released messages of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.

Management stated the organization want to steer clear of politics – a stance colored, possibly, by the fact that a sizable portion of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. After significant public pressure, the organization subsequently committed $1m in support for families directly impacted by the operations but issued no official condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their 2024 championship win at the White House – a decision that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", given the Dodgers' pride in having been the first major league franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the values it represents by officials and current and former athletes. A number of team members including the manager had voiced unwillingness to go to the event during the first term but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from the organization.

Business Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released balance sheets, involve a share in a private prison company that runs enforcement centers. The group's leadership has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to current agendas.

These factors add up to significant conflicted emotions among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought championship triumph and the ensuing outpouring of team support across the city.

"Can one to root for the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article ruminating on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have brought the squad the luck it required to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Many supporters who share similar reservations seem to have concluded that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the manager and his athletes but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Past Context and Community Effect

The problem, however, goes further than only the organization's current owners. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then transferring the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 album that chronicles the events has an impoverished worker at the stadium stating that the home he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They have acted 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 wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward reality that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when the city center was subject to a evening restriction.

International Stars and Fan Bonds

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