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For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the baseball championship did not happen during the nail-biting finale last Saturday, when her team executed one death-defying escape act after another before winning in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that simultaneously upended many negative misconceptions promoted about Latinos in recent years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from left field to catch a ball he at first misjudged in the stadium lights, then fired it to second base to record another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball moments before a opposing player barreled into him, knocking him to the ground.

This wasn't merely a great sporting achievement, perhaps the key shift in the series in the Dodgers' direction after appearing for much of the games like the weaker side. For Molina, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant drumbeat of criticism from national leaders.

"The players put forth this counter-narrative," explained the professor. "The world saw Latinos displaying an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a contrast with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and pursued. It is so easy to be disheartened these days."

Not that it's exactly simple to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as half of the venue's 50,000 spots each time.

A Complicated Relationship with the Team

When intensified immigration raids began in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were deployed into the city to react to ensuing protests, two of the city's soccer teams quickly released messages of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the Dodgers prefer to steer clear of political issues – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a significant minority of the supporters, including Latinos, are followers of certain political figures. Under considerable external demands, the team later pledged $1m in support for individuals personally impacted by the operations but made no public condemnation of the administration.

White House Event and Historical Legacy

Months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an offer to celebrate their previous championship win at the official residence – a move that sports writers labeled as "disappointing … spineless … and hypocritical", considering the team's pride in having been the pioneering major league team to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the frequent references of that history and the values it embodies by officials and current and former players. Several players including the manager had voiced reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to demands from team management.

Business Control and Supporter Conflicts

An additional issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, according to media reports and its own released financial documents, involve a stake in a private prison company that runs detention facilities. The group's executives has said many times that it wants to remain neutral of political matters, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own type of compliance to certain policies.

These factors add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in particular – sentiments that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-won World Series triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.

"Can one to root for the team?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the beginning of the postseason in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo was unable to finally bring himself to watch the championship, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have given the team the fortune it required to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Owners

Numerous fans who share similar misgivings seem to have concluded that they can keep to support the team and its lineup of global players, featuring the Asian megastar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. At no place was this more clear than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the manager and his players but jeered the executive and the chief executive of the ownership group.

"These men in formal attire do not get to take our boys in blue from us," Molina said. "We have been with the team longer than they have."

Past Context and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, however, runs deeper than only the organization's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s required the municipality razing three working-class Hispanic neighborhoods on a elevated area above the city center and then selling the land to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song 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 a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, perhaps the region's most influential Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He describes the Dodgers the Flamin' Hot Cheetos of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even unhealthy following by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for years.

"They have put one arm around Latino followers while picking their pockets with the other hand for so long because they have been able to avoid consequences," the writer wrote over the warmer months, when calls to boycott the team over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the protests when downtown LA was subject to a evening curfew.

Global Players and Fan Bonds

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