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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying escape act after another and then winning in overtime against the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning play that simultaneously upended numerous harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in recent years.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't just a great athletic moment, perhaps the key shift in the series in the Dodgers' favor after appearing for much of the series like the weaker side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"The players put forth this counter-narrative," said Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so easy to be disheartened these days."

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend faithfully to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 spots per game.

The Mixed Connection with the Organization

When intensified enforcement operations started in the city in June, and military units were sent into the area to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local sports clubs quickly released statements of support with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

Management has said the Dodgers prefer to stay away of political issues – a stance colored, possibly, by the reality that a sizable minority of the supporters, even Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. After considerable external demands, the team subsequently committed $one million in support for families personally affected by the operations but issued no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Historical Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not hesitate in accepting an offer to celebrate their previous championship win at the White House – a decision that sports writers described as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", considering the team's pride in having been the first professional franchise to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it embodies by executives and current and former athletes. Several players including the coach had expressed unwillingness to go to the White House during the initial period but either changed their minds or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Control and Supporter Dilemmas

A further complication for fans is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own published financial documents, involve a share in a detention company that operates detention centers. Guggenheim's executives has said many times that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Latino supporters in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-won World Series victory and the following explosion of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" area columnist one observer agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his one-man boycott must have brought the squad the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Many fans who share similar reservations appear to have concluded that they can continue to back the team and its lineup of international players, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's business overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in approval of the manager and his athletes but booed the team president and the top official of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."

Past Context and Community Impact

The issue, though, goes further than only the organization's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the city razing 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 track on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the story has an low-income worker at the stadium revealing that the home he lost to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional relationship between the team and its fanbase. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the organization over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly curfew.

Global Players and Community Bonds

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