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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the nail-biting finale last Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying escape feat after another and then prevailing in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier players, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, game-winning sequence that simultaneously challenged numerous harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The play itself was stunning: Hernández raced in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first lost in the bright lights, then threw it to second base to secure another, decisive out. the second baseman, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, knocking him to the ground.

This was not just a great athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for much of the series like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this counter-narrative," said Molina. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so simple to be demoralized right now."

However, it's entirely simple to be a team fan these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to home games and occupy as many as half of the stadium's fifty thousand spots per game.

The Mixed Connection with the Team

After aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard troops were sent into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the city's sports teams quickly released messages of solidarity with immigrant families – but not the baseball team.

Management stated the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, possibly, by the fact that a significant portion of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of certain leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the organization later committed $1m in support for families directly affected by the raids but made no public criticism of the administration.

White House Event and Historical Legacy

Months before, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to mark their previous World Series victory at the official residence – a decision that sports writers labeled as "pathetic … weak … and contradictory", given the team's boast in having been the first professional franchise to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the principles it represents by officials and current and past players. Several players including the manager had expressed unwillingness to travel to the event during the first term but either reconsidered or gave in to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own published financial documents, include a stake in a private prison corporation that operates detention centers. The group's leadership has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to current policies.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in particular – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to root for the team?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". He couldn't finally bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have brought the team the fortune it needed to win.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous supporters who have similar reservations seem to have decided that they can continue to back the players and its roster of global players, including the Japanese superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the manager and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

"These men in formal attire do not get to take our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Impact

The issue, however, runs deeper than only the organization's current proprietors. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the city demolishing three low-income Hispanic communities on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then transferring the land to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 record that documents the story has an low-income worker at the stadium stating that the house he lost to removal is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps the region's most widely followed Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a darker side to the long, problematic relationship between the franchise and its audience. He calls the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by too many Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano noted over the warmer months, when calls to avoid the team over its absence of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward reality that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when the city center was under to a evening restriction.

International Stars and Community Bonds

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