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For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the World Series didn't happen during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple death-defying escape act after another before winning in overtime against the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, decisive play that simultaneously challenged numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent years.

The play in itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to record another, decisive out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not merely a great sporting moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the Dodgers' direction after looking for much of the games like the weaker side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for the community and for the city after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," said the professor. "The world saw Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so simple to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

The Complicated Relationship with the Organization

After intensified enforcement operations began in the city 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 immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

Management has said the Dodgers want to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant portion of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of current leaders. Under significant external demands, the team subsequently committed $one million in aid for families directly impacted by the raids but made no official criticism of the government.

Official Event and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an invitation to mark their previous championship win at the White House – a move that local columnists described as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the team's boast in having been the first professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular invocations of that history and the values it embodies by executives and present and past athletes. Several team members such as the coach had expressed reluctance to travel to the White House during the first term but then changed their minds or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Business Control and Supporter Dilemmas

A further complication for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a private prison corporation that runs detention centers. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

These factors add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won championship victory and the ensuing outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" area columnist one observer reflected at the start of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his personal boycott must have given the squad the fortune it required to win.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Numerous fans who have Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the coach and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to claim our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, runs deeper than only the team's current owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a hill overlooking the city center and then selling the land to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A track on a mid-2000s record that documents the events has an low-income worker at the venue stating that the home he forfeited to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly southern California most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its audience. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, 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 for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the summer, when calls to boycott the team over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a evening restriction.

Global Players and Fan Connections

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