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In the eyes of a lifelong Dodgers fan and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable moment of the baseball championship did not occur during the nail-biting finale on Saturday, when her squad pulled off one death-defying escape act after another before winning in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened in the previous game, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, pulled off a electrifying, game-winning sequence that at the same time challenged numerous harmful stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past decades.

The play itself was breathtaking: Hernández raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he at first misjudged in the bright lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning out. Rojas, at second base, received the ball just a split second before a runner collided with him, sending him backwards.

This wasn't just a great athletic moment, possibly the key shift in momentum in the team's favor after looking for most of the games like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for the community and for the city after months of immigration raids, troops monitoring the neighborhoods, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy presented this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being key figures on the team, exhibiting a different kind of masculinity. They are energetic, they're cheering, they're removing their shirts."

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

However, it's entirely straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the many of other fans who attend faithfully to home games and occupy as many as half of the venue's 50,000 seats each time.

A Complicated Relationship with the Team

When aggressive enforcement operations started in Los Angeles in June, and national guard units were sent into the city to respond to resulting demonstrations, two of the local sports teams promptly issued statements of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.

The team president has said the organization want to stay away of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant portion of the supporters, including some Hispanic fans, are followers of current political figures. After significant external demands, the team later committed $1m in support for families personally impacted by the raids but issued no public condemnation of the government.

Official Event and Past Heritage

Months earlier, the organization did not delay in agreeing to an invitation to mark their previous championship win at the White House – a move that local columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering professional franchise to end the racial segregation in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that history and the principles it embodies by officials and current and former players. Several players such as the coach had voiced reluctance to go to the White House during the first term but then changed their minds or gave in to demands from team management.

Corporate Ownership and Supporter Dilemmas

A further issue for supporters is that the team are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, according to sources and its own released balance sheets, include a share in a private prison corporation that runs detention centers. The group's leadership has stated many times that it aims to stay out of political matters, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of compliance to certain agendas.

These factors contribute to significant mixed feelings among Latino supporters in especial – feelings that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought championship triumph and the following outpouring of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Can one to root for the Dodgers?" local columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful article pondering on "Dodger blue in our blood, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to watch the World Series, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he decided his personal protest must have brought the team the luck it needed to succeed.

Separating the Team from the Owners

Numerous supporters who have Galindo's misgivings appear to have decided that they can keep to support the team and its roster of international stars, featuring the Japanese superstar a key player, while expressing disdain on the organization's business leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on Monday, when the capacity crowd cheered in support of the manager and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.

"The executives in formal attire don't get to take our players from us," Molina said. "We've been with the Dodgers longer than they have."

Historical Context and Neighborhood Effect

The problem, though, goes further than only the team's current owners. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the 1950s involved the city razing three working-class Latino communities on a elevated area above downtown and then selling the property to the organization for a fraction of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 record that documents the story has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium stating that the house he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.

Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most widely followed Mexican American writer and broadcaster, sees a more troubling side to the long, problematic relationship between the team and its fanbase. He describes the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an undue, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its fans for decades.

"They have put one arm around Hispanic followers while profiting from them with the other hand for so long because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the summer, when demands to boycott the team over its lack of reaction to the raids were contradicted by the awkward fact that turnout at home games did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a nightly restriction.

Global Players and Community Bonds

Distinguishing the team from its business leadership is not a simple task, {