🔗 Share this article

For a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her team pulled off one death-defying escape act after another and then prevailing in extra innings over the opposing team.

It happened a game earlier, when two supporting players, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously challenged many negative stereotypes touted about Latinos in the past decades.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder charged in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, decisive play. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This was not just a remarkable sporting achievement, perhaps the key shift in momentum in the team's direction after appearing for most of the games like the weaker team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, security forces monitoring the streets, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"The players presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an contagious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, having a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It's so easy to be disheartened right now."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to matches and fill up as many as half of the stadium's 50,000 seats per game.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

When aggressive enforcement operations started in the city in early June, and national guard troops were deployed into the area to respond to resulting protests, two of the local sports clubs quickly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

Management stated the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of political issues – a view colored, perhaps, by the fact that a significant portion of the supporters, including Latinos, are supporters of certain leaders. After considerable external demands, the team later committed $one million in aid for families personally affected by the raids but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Heritage

Months earlier, the organization did not hesitate in accepting an offer to celebrate their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a decision that sports writers labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the team's pride in having been the first major league team to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent references of that history and the values it embodies by officials and present and past players. A number of team members such as the manager had expressed unwillingness to go to the White House during the first term but either reconsidered or succumbed to pressure from the organization.

Business Control and Supporter Conflicts

A further issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to sources and its own released financial documents, include a stake in a detention corporation that runs enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's executives has stated repeatedly that it wants to stay out of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to current policies.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the ensuing explosion of team support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an elegant essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he believed his one-man protest must have given the squad the fortune it needed to succeed.

Separating the Players from the Management

Many fans who have Galindo's misgivings seem to have decided that they can continue to back the team and its lineup of global stars, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the team's business overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in approval of the manager and his players but booed the executive and the chief executive of the investors.

"The executives in suits do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, goes further than just the organization's current owners. The deal that moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s required the municipality demolishing three working-class Latino communities on a hill above the city center and then transferring the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a 2005 album that chronicles the events has an low-income worker at the venue revealing that the home he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters for decades.

"They've acted around Latino followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the team over its lack of response to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at matches remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a evening curfew.

International Players and Fan Connections

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a easy matter, {