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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the World Series didn't happen during the tense final game last Saturday, when her squad pulled off multiple dramatic escape feat after another before prevailing in overtime against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, decisive play that at the same time upended many harmful misconceptions touted about Latinos in the past years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to record another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not merely a great athletic moment, perhaps the key turn in the series in the team's favor after looking for much of the series like the underdog team. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a much-required morale boost for the community and for the city after a period of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the streets, and a constant drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, having a different kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be disheartened right now."

However, it's entirely simple to be a Dodgers fan nowadays – for her or for the legions of other fans who attend faithfully to matches and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Organization

After intensified enforcement operations began in the city in early June, and military troops were sent into the city to respond to resulting protests, two of the local sports clubs quickly released messages of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president stated the Dodgers prefer to stay away of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant minority of the supporters, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in support for individuals directly affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the government.

White House Event and Historical Legacy

Months before, the team did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series win at the White House – a move that local writers described as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the team's boast in having been the first professional franchise to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it embodies by officials and present and former athletes. A number of players such as the manager had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from team management.

Business Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional complication for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to media reports and its own released financial documents, include a stake in a detention company that operates enforcement centers. Guggenheim's leadership has said many times that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

All of that contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this season's hard-won championship triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay pondering on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our minds". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he believed his personal protest must have brought the squad the luck it needed to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who have similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can continue to support the players and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the victory celebration at the home venue on Monday, when the capacity crowd roared in approval of the manager and his athletes but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"These men in formal attire don't get to take our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Past Background and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, goes further than only the team's current owners. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a hill overlooking downtown and then transferring the property to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s record that chronicles the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to removal is now third base.

A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most influential Latino writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They've put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly restriction.

International Players and Community Bonds

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