🔗 Share this article

In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series did not occur during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her team pulled off one death-defying comeback feat after another and then winning in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came in the previous game, when two supporting athletes, the Puerto Rican player and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning play that at the same time upended numerous harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The play itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to the infield to secure another, game-winning out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball moments before a opposing player collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a great athletic achievement, perhaps the key shift in the series in the team's direction after appearing for much of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed morale boost for Latinos and for the city after a period of immigration raids, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from official sources.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be disheartened these days."

However, it's entirely simple to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's fifty thousand spots per game.

A Mixed Relationship with the Team

When intensified enforcement operations started in the city in early June, and national guard troops were deployed into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local sports clubs promptly issued messages of solidarity with immigrant families – while the baseball team.

Management stated the organization prefer to stay away of politics – a view influenced, possibly, by the fact that a sizable minority of the fans, even Latinos, are followers of current leaders. After considerable external demands, the team subsequently committed $1m in support for families directly impacted by the raids but made no official condemnation of the administration.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Three months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their 2024 championship win at the official residence – a decision that local columnists described as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional team to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that history and the values it embodies by officials and present and past players. Several team members including the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the initial period but either reconsidered or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

A further complication for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose investments, as per media reports and its own released financial documents, include a share in a detention company that runs enforcement facilities. The group's executives has stated repeatedly that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to certain policies.

All of that add up to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic fans in especial – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this year's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of team pride across the city.

"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" local columnist one observer agonized at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the squad the luck it required to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Many fans who have similar reservations seem to have concluded that they can continue to back the players and its roster of international players, including the Asian superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate overlords. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the coach and his athletes but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire do not get to take our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Effect

The issue, however, runs deeper than just the organization's present proprietors. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the 1950s involved the city demolishing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area above the city center and then selling the property to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 record that chronicles the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the house he forfeited to eviction is now third base.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They have acted around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the organization over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a nightly curfew.

International Players and Fan Bonds

Distinguishing the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {