🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't happen during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her squad pulled off one dramatic comeback act after another before prevailing in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, decisive sequence that at the same time upended many harmful stereotypes promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The moment itself was stunning: Hernández charged in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive play. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not merely a great sporting moment, possibly the key turn in the series in the team's favor after looking for much of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It's so simple to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for her or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand seats each time.

The Mixed Connection with the Organization

After intensified immigration raids began in the city in June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the local soccer teams quickly released statements of support with affected communities – but not the Dodgers.

Management has said the Dodgers want to stay away of political issues – a stance colored, possibly, by the fact that a significant minority of the supporters, including Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. After considerable public pressure, the team later pledged $one million in support for individuals directly affected by the raids but issued no public condemnation of the government.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an offer to celebrate their 2024 World Series win at the official residence – a move that local writers described as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular invocations of that history and the values it embodies by officials and current and former athletes. Several players such as the manager had voiced reluctance to go to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own released balance sheets, include a share in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement facilities. The group's executives has stated many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to current agendas.

All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" area columnist one observer reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant article pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the extent that he decided his one-man protest must have brought the team the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Players from the Owners

Many fans who have Galindo's reservations appear to have concluded that they can keep to support the players and its lineup of international players, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the manager and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in suits don't get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Impact

The problem, though, runs deeper than only the team's current proprietors. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three low-income Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area above downtown and then transferring the land to the organization for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an low-income parking attendant at the venue revealing that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the summer, when demands to boycott the organization over its absence of response to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a evening restriction.

Global Players and Fan Connections

Separating the team from its corporate owners is not a easy task, {