🔗 Share this article

For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her squad executed multiple dramatic comeback feat after another before prevailing in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged many harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to record another, game-winning play. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a great athletic achievement, perhaps the key turn in the series in the team's direction after looking for most of the games like the underdog side. For Molina, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for the community and for Los Angeles after a period of enforcement actions, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of confidence. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented 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 demoralized right now."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a team supporter these days – for her or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 seats per game.

A Mixed Relationship with the Team

After aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to react to ensuing demonstrations, two of the local sports teams promptly released statements of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of politics – a view influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a significant minority of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current political figures. After considerable public pressure, the team later pledged $one million in support for families directly impacted by the raids but issued no public condemnation of the administration.

Official Event and Past Heritage

Three months before, the organization did not delay in accepting an invitation to celebrate their 2024 championship win at the White House – a decision that local writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the team's pride in having been the pioneering professional franchise to break the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the values it represents by executives and present and former players. A number of team members such as the coach had voiced reluctance to travel to the event during the initial period but then changed their minds or gave in to pressure from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the Dodgers are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, as per sources and its own released financial documents, involve a stake in a detention corporation that operates enforcement centers. The group's leadership has said many times that it aims to stay out of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to certain agendas.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won championship triumph and the following outpouring of team pride across the city.

"Can one to support the Dodgers?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant article ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the point that he believed his personal protest must have given the team the fortune it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who share Galindo's misgivings appear to have concluded that they can keep to back the team and its roster of international players, including the Japanese superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, 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.

"These men in suits do not get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, though, goes further than only the organization's current owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Hispanic communities on a hill overlooking the city center and then selling the property to the team for a small part of its market value. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most influential Latino columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, problematic dynamic between the team and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They have acted around Hispanic fans while picking their pockets with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when demands to avoid the organization over its lack of response to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Stars and Community Bonds

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