For Natalia Molina and longtime Mexican American, the crowning moment of the World Series didn't happen during the tense final game last Saturday, when her team executed multiple death-defying escape act after another before prevailing in extra innings against the opposing team.
It came in the previous game, when two supporting players, Kike Hernández and the Venezuelan infielder, pulled off a thrilling, decisive sequence that at the same time challenged many negative stereotypes promoted about Hispanic people in the past decades.
The play in itself was breathtaking: the outfielder raced in from the outfield to snag a ball he initially misjudged in the stadium lights, then threw it to the infield to record another, game-winning play. Rojas, at second base, caught the ball just a split second before a opposing player collided with him, sending him to the ground.
This was not just a great athletic achievement, perhaps the decisive shift in momentum in the Dodgers' favor after looking for much of the series like the weaker team. For Molina, it was exhilarating, on multiple levels, a much-required morale boost for Latinos and for the city after a period of enforcement actions, troops patrolling the neighborhoods, and a steady stream of criticism from national leaders.
"The players put forth this alternative story," said the professor. "The world saw Latinos showing an infectious pride and joy in what they do, being leaders on the team, exhibiting a distinct kind of masculinity. They're bombastic, they're yelling, they're taking off their shirts."
"It was such a juxtaposition with what we see on the news – raids, Latinos thrown to the ground and chased down. It is so simple to be disheartened right now."
Not that it's exactly straightforward to be a team fan nowadays – for Molina or for the legions of other fans who attend regularly to home games and fill up as many as 50% of the venue's 50,000 spots each time.
When aggressive immigration raids started in Los Angeles in early June, and military units were sent into the city to react to resulting protests, two of the local soccer clubs promptly released messages of support with affected communities – while the baseball team.
Management has said the Dodgers prefer to stay away of politics – a stance colored, perhaps, by the reality that a sizable minority of the fans, including Latinos, are followers of current leaders. Under considerable public pressure, the team subsequently pledged $1m in aid for families personally affected by the operations but issued no public criticism of the government.
Months before, the organization did not delay in accepting an invitation to mark their 2024 World Series victory at the White House – a move that local columnists labeled as "pathetic … spineless … and hypocritical", given the Dodgers' boast in having been the pioneering major league franchise to break the color barrier in the mid-20th century and the frequent invocations of that history and the principles it embodies by executives and current and past athletes. Several team members including the coach had expressed unwillingness to travel to the White House during the first term but then reconsidered or succumbed to demands from team management.
An additional issue for fans is that the team are owned by a large investment group, the ownership group, whose investments, according to media reports and its own released financial documents, involve a share in a private prison corporation that operates detention centers. Guggenheim's executives has said repeatedly that it wants to stay out of political matters, but its critics say the silence – and the investment – are their own type of acquiescence to certain agendas.
These factors add up to significant mixed feelings among Latino supporters in especial – feelings that surfaced even in the excitement of this season's hard-fought championship triumph and the ensuing explosion of Dodgers pride across Los Angeles.
"Is it okay to root for the Dodgers?" local columnist Erick Galindo agonized at the beginning of the playoffs in an thoughtful article ruminating on "team loyalty in our blood, but doubt in our minds". Galindo couldn't ultimately bring himself to view the World Series, but he still felt deeply, to the point that he believed his personal boycott must have given the team the luck it required to succeed.
Numerous fans who have similar misgivings seem to have decided that they can continue to back the team and its lineup of global stars, including the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, while pouring scorn on the organization's business overlords. Nowhere was this more clear than at the championship parade at the home venue on the following day, when the capacity crowd cheered in approval of the coach and his athletes but booed the team president and the top official of the investors.
"These men in formal attire don't get to claim our boys in blue from us," the fan said. "We have been with the Dodgers for more time than they have."
The problem, though, runs deeper than just the team's current owners. The agreement that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to the city in the late 1950s involved the municipality razing three working-class Latino neighborhoods on a elevated area overlooking downtown and then transferring the land to the team for a small part of its market value. A song on a 2005 album that documents the story has an low-income worker at the venue stating that the home he forfeited to eviction is now a part of the field.
A prominent commentator, possibly the region's most influential Latino columnist and broadcaster, sees a darker side to the long, dysfunctional dynamic between the franchise and its audience. He calls the team the popular snack of baseball, "a business organization with an excessive, even harmful devotion by numerous Latinos" that has been exploiting its supporters 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 noted over the summer, when calls to boycott the team over its lack of reaction to the enforcement actions were upended by the uncomfortable reality that attendance at home games did not dip, even at the peak of the demonstrations when the city center was subject to a nightly restriction.
Separating the team from its business leadership is not a easy task, {
Elara is a seasoned gaming journalist with a passion for slot mechanics and player strategies.
