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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't happen during the tense finale on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple dramatic comeback act after another and then winning in overtime over the opposing team.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, game-winning play that at the same time upended numerous negative misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The moment itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, sending him backwards.

This was not just a remarkable sporting moment, perhaps the key turn in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for most of the games like the underdog team. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the streets, and a steady drumbeat of criticism from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who show up regularly to matches and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand seats each time.

A Mixed Relationship with the Team

After aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard units were deployed into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the local soccer clubs promptly issued statements of support with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a view influenced, possibly, by the reality that a significant portion of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of current leaders. Under considerable external demands, the team later pledged $one million in aid for families personally impacted by the operations but made no official criticism of the administration.

Official Visit and Historical Heritage

Months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous World Series win at the official residence – a decision that local columnists labeled as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the first professional team to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by officials and current and former athletes. Several team members including the manager had voiced unwillingness to travel to the White House during the first term but either changed their minds or succumbed to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas

An additional complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released balance sheets, include a share in a private prison corporation that operates enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated many times that it aims to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to certain policies.

All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won championship victory and the ensuing explosion of team support across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" local columnist one observer agonized at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he believed his one-man protest must have given the team the fortune it required to win.

Separating the Players from the Management

Many supporters who share similar reservations appear to have decided that they can continue to support the players and its roster of global players, featuring the Japanese megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at the home venue on Monday, when the packed audience roared in support of the manager and his athletes but jeered the team president and the top official of the investors.

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

Past Context and Community Effect

The problem, however, goes further than only the organization's present owners. The agreement that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the city demolishing three working-class Hispanic communities on a hill overlooking the city center and then selling the land to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when calls to boycott the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when downtown LA was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Fan Connections

Separating the team from its business leadership is not a easy task, {