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For Natalia Molina and third-generation Mexican American, the most memorable highlight of the baseball championship didn't occur during the nail-biting final game on Saturday, when her team pulled off multiple death-defying comeback act after another before prevailing in extra innings over the Toronto Blue Jays.

It came a game earlier, when two second-tier players, Kike Hernández and Miguel Rojas, executed a electrifying, game-winning play that at the same time challenged many negative misconceptions promoted about Hispanic people in the past years.

The moment in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced 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, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a runner barreled into him, sending him backwards.

This was not merely a remarkable sporting achievement, perhaps the key shift in the series in the team's favor after looking for much of the series like the weaker side. To her, it was thrilling, on multiple levels, a much-required uplift for the community and for the city after months of immigration raids, security forces patrolling the neighborhoods, and a constant stream of negativity from official sources.

"The players put forth this alternative story," explained the professor. "Everyone witnessed Latinos displaying an contagious pride and joy in what they do, acting as leaders on the team, having a different kind of confidence. They are energetic, they're yelling, they're removing their shirts."

"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos detained and chased down. It's so simple to be demoralized these days."

Not that it's entirely straightforward to be a team supporter nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other Latinos who attend faithfully to home games and occupy as many as 50% of the venue's fifty thousand seats per game.

The Mixed Connection with the Team

After aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and military troops were deployed into the city to respond to ensuing protests, two of the local soccer teams promptly released messages of support with immigrant families – but not the Dodgers.

The team president stated the organization want to stay away of political issues – a stance influenced, perhaps, by the fact that a significant minority of the supporters, even Latinos, are followers of current leaders. Under considerable external demands, the organization later committed $1m in support for families personally affected by the operations but issued no official condemnation of the government.

White House Visit and Past Legacy

Months earlier, the team did not hesitate in agreeing to an invitation to celebrate their previous World Series win at the White House – a decision that sports writers described as "disappointing … spineless … and contradictory", considering the Dodgers' boast in having been the first professional team to break the racial segregation in the 1940s and the regular references of that history and the principles it represents by executives and present and past players. A number of players including the coach had expressed reluctance to travel to the White House during the initial period but then changed their minds or succumbed to demands from the organization.

Corporate Ownership and Fan Conflicts

A further issue for supporters is that the team are owned by a corporate behemoth, the ownership group, whose investments, as per media reports and its own published balance sheets, include a stake in a detention corporation that operates detention facilities. Guggenheim's executives has stated many times that it wants to stay out of politics, but its detractors say the inaction – and the investment – are their own form of compliance to certain policies.

All of that add up to considerable mixed feelings among Hispanic supporters in especial – sentiments that emerged even in the excitement of this year's hard-fought World Series triumph and the following explosion of Dodgers support across Los Angeles.

"Can one to support the team?" area columnist Erick Galindo reflected at the start of the playoffs in an thoughtful essay ruminating on "team loyalty in our veins, but doubt in our minds". Galindo couldn't finally bring himself to view the World Series, but he still cared strongly, to the point that he decided his personal boycott must have given the squad the fortune it needed to succeed.

Distinguishing the Team from the Management

Numerous supporters who have similar misgivings appear to have decided that they can keep to support the team and its lineup of international stars, featuring the Asian megastar a key player, while pouring scorn on the team's business leadership. At no place was this more evident than at the championship parade at Dodger Stadium on the following day, when the packed audience roared in support of the manager and his athletes but booed 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 for more time than they have."

Past Context and Community Effect

The problem, though, goes further than only the team's current proprietors. The deal that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in the late 1950s involved the municipality razing three low-income Hispanic communities on a elevated area above the city center and then selling the land to the team for a fraction of its actual worth. A track on a mid-2000s album that chronicles the story has an impoverished worker at the venue 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 darker side to the lengthy, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its fanbase. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a corporate entity with an undue, even harmful following by too many Latinos" that has been shortchanging its supporters for decades.

"They have acted around Latino fans while profiting from them with the other hand for so much time because they have been able to get away with it," the writer wrote over the warmer months, when demands to boycott the team over its absence of response to the enforcement actions were contradicted by the awkward reality that turnout at matches did not dip, even at the height of the demonstrations when downtown LA was under to a nightly restriction.

International Stars and Fan Bonds

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