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For a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship did not occur during the tense final game on Saturday, when her squad pulled off one death-defying escape act after another and then winning in overtime against the opposing team.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a electrifying, decisive sequence that at the same time upended many harmful misconceptions promoted about Latinos in the past years.

The play itself was stunning: the outfielder charged in from left field to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to the infield to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, positioned nearby, received the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't merely a remarkable sporting achievement, possibly the key shift in momentum in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for much of the series like the weaker team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for Latinos and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. 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 detained and pursued. It's so simple to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who show up faithfully to matches and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand spots each time.

A Mixed Connection with the Team

After intensified enforcement operations began in the city in early June, and military units were deployed into the city to react to resulting demonstrations, two of the local sports teams promptly released messages of support with affected communities – while the Dodgers.

Management stated the organization want to stay away of politics – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a significant portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of certain political figures. After considerable public pressure, the organization subsequently pledged $1m in aid for individuals personally affected by the raids but issued no official criticism of the government.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Three months earlier, the team did not delay in accepting an invitation to celebrate their previous championship win at the White House – a decision that local writers described as "pathetic … weak … and hypocritical", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first major league team to break the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and current and past players. Several team members including the coach had expressed reluctance to go to the event during the initial period but either reconsidered or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Conflicts

An additional complication for fans is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, Guggenheim Partners, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released balance sheets, involve a stake in a detention company that runs enforcement facilities. Guggenheim's leadership has stated many times that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its detractors say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to current policies.

These factors add up to considerable conflicted emotions among Latino supporters in particular – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought World Series triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an elegant article pondering on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have given the team the luck it needed to succeed.

Distinguishing the Players from the Owners

Numerous fans who share similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to support the players and its lineup of international players, including the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate overlords. At no place was this more clear than at the victory celebration at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

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

Historical Background and Community Effect

The problem, though, goes further than just the team's present proprietors. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three working-class 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 song on a mid-2000s record that documents the events has an low-income worker at the venue revealing that the house he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most widely followed Mexican American columnist and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the lengthy, dysfunctional relationship between the franchise and its audience. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a evening restriction.

Global Stars and Community Bonds

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