🔗 Share this article

For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the tense finale last Saturday, when her squad executed one death-defying comeback act after another before winning in extra innings against the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two supporting athletes, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a thrilling, game-winning sequence that at the same time upended numerous negative misconceptions touted about Hispanic people in recent years.

The play in itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from left field to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to second base to record another, decisive out. Rojas, positioned nearby, caught the ball moments before a runner barreled into him, knocking him backwards.

This wasn't just a remarkable athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the team's favor after appearing for much of the games like the underdog side. To her, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a much-required uplift for Latinos and for the city after months of enforcement actions, security forces patrolling the streets, and a steady drumbeat of negativity from national leaders.

"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "Everyone witnessed Latinos showing an infectious enthusiasm in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a different kind of confidence. They are bombastic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"This represented such a juxtaposition with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos thrown to the ground and pursued. It's so simple to be demoralized these days."

However, it's exactly simple to be a team supporter these days – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who show up regularly to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand seats per game.

A Complicated Relationship with the Team

When aggressive enforcement operations began in Los Angeles in June, and military troops were deployed into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the city's soccer teams quickly released statements of solidarity with immigrant families – while the Dodgers.

Management stated the organization prefer to steer clear of politics – a view influenced, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, including some Hispanic fans, are supporters of current political figures. Under significant public pressure, the organization subsequently pledged $one million in support for individuals personally impacted by the raids but issued no official condemnation of the government.

Official Visit and Past Heritage

Months earlier, the team did not hesitate in accepting an invitation to celebrate their 2024 championship victory at the White House – a decision that sports columnists described as "disappointing … weak … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional team to end the color barrier in the 1940s and the frequent invocations of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and present and past players. Several players including the coach had voiced unwillingness to go to the event during the initial period but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Business Control and Fan Dilemmas

An additional issue for fans is that the Dodgers are controlled by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, as per sources and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a detention company that runs enforcement facilities. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the silence – and the financial stake – are their own type of compliance to current policies.

These factors contribute to significant conflicted emotions among Hispanic supporters in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the euphoria of this season's hard-fought World Series triumph and the following explosion of Dodgers pride across the city.

"Can one to support the team?" local writer Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the postseason in an thoughtful essay pondering on "Dodger blue in our veins, but uncertainty in our minds". Galindo was unable to ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the point that he believed his one-man boycott must have given the team the luck it needed to win.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Many fans who have similar misgivings appear to have concluded that they can keep to back the team and its lineup of international stars, including the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while expressing disdain on the organization's corporate leadership. Nowhere was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his players but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.

"The executives in suits do not get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We've been with the team for more time than they have."

Past Background and Community Effect

The issue, however, goes further than only the organization's present proprietors. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s required the municipality razing three low-income Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking the city center and then transferring the property to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a mid-2000s album that documents the events has an impoverished parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he lost to eviction is now a part of the field.

A prominent commentator, possibly southern California most widely followed Latino writer and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the lengthy, problematic dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. 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 shortchanging its fans for decades.

"They've put one arm around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," Arellano wrote over the warmer months, when demands to avoid the team over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the uncomfortable reality that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a nightly curfew.

Global Players and Fan Connections

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