🔗 Share this article

For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship did not happen during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying escape feat after another and then winning in overtime over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier athletes, the Puerto Rican player and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged numerous harmful misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The moment itself was stunning: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to secure another, decisive play. the second baseman, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a great athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for much of the games like the underdog team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a badly needed morale boost for the community and for Los Angeles after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from official sources.

"The players presented this counter-narrative," explained Molina. "Everyone saw Latinos displaying an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."

"This represented such a contrast with what we see on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It's so easy to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend regularly to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's 50,000 seats each time.

The Complicated Connection with the Organization

After aggressive enforcement operations began in the city in June, and military units were deployed into the city to respond to ensuing demonstrations, two of the city's sports teams quickly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – but not the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers want to stay away of politics – a view influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable portion of the fans, even some Hispanic fans, are followers of current leaders. Under considerable external demands, the team later pledged $1m in aid for families personally affected by the operations but made no public criticism of the administration.

Official Event and Past Heritage

Three months before, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to mark their 2024 championship win at the White House – a decision that local writers labeled as "disappointing … weak … and hypocritical", given the team's pride in having been the first major league team to end the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the values it represents by executives and present and former players. A number of team members including the coach had expressed reluctance to travel to the event during the initial period but then changed their minds or gave in to demands from team management.

Business Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further complication for supporters is that the Dodgers are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released financial documents, involve a share in a detention corporation that operates detention centers. The group's executives has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its critics say the silence – and the investment – are their own form of acquiescence to current agendas.

These factors contribute to considerable mixed feelings among Latino fans in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought championship victory and the following outpouring of Dodgers support across the city.

"Is it okay to support the Dodgers?" local columnist one observer agonized at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but doubt in our hearts". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still felt strongly, to the extent that he decided his personal boycott must have brought the team the luck it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Players from the Management

Numerous fans who have similar misgivings seem to have decided that they can keep to back the players and its roster of global players, featuring the Asian megastar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the team's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the team president and the chief executive of the investors.

"These men in suits don't get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Historical Context and Community Effect

The issue, however, goes further than just the team's current owners. The agreement that moved the former franchise to Los Angeles in the 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three low-income Latino communities on a hill overlooking downtown and then transferring the property to the organization for a fraction of its market value. A track on a 2005 album that documents the events has an impoverished worker at the venue revealing that the home he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, possibly the region's most influential Mexican American columnist and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its audience. He calls the team the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an excessive, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for years.

"They've put one arm around Hispanic fans while profiting from them with the other for so long because they have been able to get away with it," the writer noted over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the team over its absence of response to the raids were upended by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

International Players and Fan Bonds

Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple task, {