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In the eyes of Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the tense finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another before prevailing in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged many negative misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment itself was stunning: the outfielder raced in from left field to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to secure another, game-winning out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not just a remarkable sporting moment, possibly the key shift in the series in the Dodgers' direction after looking for most of the games like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so simple to be disheartened right now."

However, it's entirely simple to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 spots each time.

The Mixed Connection with the Team

When aggressive immigration raids began in the city in June, and military troops were deployed into the area to react to resulting protests, two of the city's sports teams quickly issued messages of solidarity with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization want to steer clear of political issues – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a sizable minority of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of certain leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the team later pledged $1m in support for individuals personally impacted by the raids but issued no public criticism of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Heritage

Three months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an offer to mark their previous World Series win at the White House – a move that local writers described as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", given the team's boast in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the regular references of that legacy and the values it embodies by executives and present and past athletes. A number of players including the coach had expressed unwillingness to go to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

A further issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own released balance sheets, include a stake in a private prison company that operates enforcement facilities. The group's executives has stated many times that it aims to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to current agendas.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic fans in especial – feelings that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the following explosion of team support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the team?" area writer Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have given the team the luck it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Many fans who have Galindo's reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its roster of global stars, featuring the Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the coach and his athletes but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

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

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, however, runs deeper than only the organization's current owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s required the municipality demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a hill above downtown and then transferring the property to the organization for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the events has an low-income worker at the venue stating that the home he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly southern California most widely followed Latino writer and media personality, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its audience. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a evening restriction.

Global Stars and Fan Bonds

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