For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the nail-biting final game last Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying escape act after another and then prevailing in overtime against the opposing team.
It happened a game earlier, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, executed a thrilling, decisive play that at the same time upended many negative stereotypes touted about Hispanic people in the past decades.
The moment itself was breathtaking: Hernández charged in from the outfield to catch a ball he initially misjudged in the bright lights, then fired it to second base to record another, decisive play. the second baseman, 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 achievement, perhaps the decisive turn in momentum in the team's favor after appearing for most of the games like the weaker side. For Molina, it was exhilarating, politically and culturally, a badly needed uplift for the community and for Los Angeles after a period of immigration raids, troops monitoring the streets, and a constant stream of criticism from national leaders.
"Kike and Miggy put forth this alternative story," said Molina. "The world witnessed Latinos showing an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as key figures on the team, exhibiting a different kind of confidence. They're energetic, they're cheering, they're taking off their shirts."
"This represented such a contrast with what we observe on the news – enforcement actions, Latinos detained and chased down. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."
However, it's exactly simple to be a Dodgers supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend regularly to matches and fill up as many as 50% of the stadium's fifty thousand seats per game.
The Complicated Connection with the Organization
When intensified enforcement operations started in the city in June, and national guard units were deployed into the area to react to resulting protests, two of the city's sports clubs promptly released statements of solidarity with affected communities – while the Dodgers.
Management stated the Dodgers want to steer clear of politics – a view colored, perhaps, by the reality that a significant minority of the supporters, even Latinos, are supporters of current political figures. After significant external demands, the team later committed $one million in support for families personally affected by the operations but issued no official condemnation of the government.
White House Visit and Historical Legacy
Three months before, the team did not delay in accepting an offer to celebrate their previous championship victory at the official residence – a move that local writers described as "pathetic … spineless … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional team to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the regular references of that legacy and the principles it embodies by executives and current and former athletes. Several players including the coach had voiced unwillingness to go to the White House during the initial period but either reconsidered or gave in to pressure from the organization.
Corporate Ownership and Fan Dilemmas
An additional issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose equity holdings, as per media reports and its own released balance sheets, involve a stake in a detention corporation that runs detention centers. The group's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to remain neutral of politics, but its critics say the inaction – and the financial stake – are their own form of acquiescence to current policies.
All of that contribute to significant mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the euphoria of this season's hard-won World Series victory and the following explosion of team support across Los Angeles.
"Can one to root for the team?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an elegant essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but uncertainty in our hearts". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the championship, but he still cared deeply, to the extent that he decided his personal protest must have brought the team the fortune it needed to win.
Separating the Team from the Management
Many supporters who have similar reservations appear to have decided that they can continue to support the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Asian superstar a key player, while pouring scorn on the organization's corporate overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the victory celebration at the home venue on the following day, when the packed audience cheered in approval of the coach and his players but jeered the executive and the top official of the ownership group.
"These men in formal attire don't get to claim our players from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers longer than they have."
Historical Context and Neighborhood Impact
The problem, however, goes further than only the organization's current owners. The deal that brought the former franchise to the city in the late 1950s involved the municipality demolishing three low-income Hispanic communities on a hill above downtown and then transferring the property to the team for a small part of its actual worth. A song on a 2005 album that documents the story has an low-income parking attendant at the stadium revealing that the home he lost to removal is now a part of the field.
Gustavo Arellano, perhaps southern California most influential Mexican American writer and media personality, sees a more troubling side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the team and its audience. He describes the Dodgers the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even unhealthy devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been shortchanging its fans for decades.
"They have acted around Latino fans while picking their pockets with the other for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the summer, when demands to avoid the team over its absence of response to the raids were contradicted by the uncomfortable fact that turnout at home games remained steady, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was under to a evening curfew.
International Players and Fan Connections
Separating the squad from its corporate owners is not a simple matter, {
